Vent du Nord (2017)

A shoe factory in northern France is relocated to Tunisia despite strong union opposition. After losing his job and receiving an economic redundancy payment, Hervé Lepoutre, a fifty-something worker with little experience of union activism, tries to rebuild his life by buying a small boat. He takes up fishing with his son Vincent, selling the modest catch discreetly to neighbors on the black market. In Tunisia, thirty-something Foued Ben Slimane gets a factory job equivalent to Hervé’s at the relocated shoe factory, thinking he will earn enough to pay for his mother’s treatment and win the heart of the woman he loves. But his barely more than one hundred euros in wages and his repetitive, unrewarding work leave him dissatisfied. During a chance tourist trip to Tunisia by Hervé and his wife Véronique, the two men physically cross paths without knowing it. As Hervé runs into the cumbersome French bureaucracy over his plans for a future career and gets into serious trouble, Foued eventually slams the factory door behind him to pursue another, even more desperate plan.