Mes frères et moi (2021)

In summer, in a seaside town in the south of France, Nour is a 14-year-old boy who has to do community service as punishment for an act of antisocial behavior. He is repainting a wall at his middle school. Things are going badly in his family: his father has left, and his mother is receiving palliative care at home, in a coma. His three older brothers handle everything: Abel (Dali Benssalah), the authoritarian eldest; Mo (Sofian Khammes), the swaggering one; and Hédi, the hothead. They all get by through odd jobs and small-scale dealings, some more legal than others. Abel sells sportswear on the black market. Mo works out and is a bisexual gigolo around a hotel pool. Hédi deals hashish and uses Nour as a lookout; rebellious, he can think only of getting far away from here. At school, Sarah (Judith Chemla), an opera singer, leads a summer opera-singing workshop. Nour joins the group. He remembers his father singing “Una furtiva lagrima” from L'elisir d'amore, and at home he regularly plays opera arias for his mother, hoping to wake her. He finds encouragement in a newfound passion that he has to hide from his brothers, who have little empathy for the artistic horizons that might allow Nour to escape the cultural environment of his everyday life.