A low-budget effort, shot with a hand-held camera, the movie has such a quiet documentary air to it that the Algerian director, director Rachid Bouchareb may as well have produced it in monochrome.
The attacks and the search for the perpetrators become almost incidental as we focus on the families of those presumed to be among the victims, seeing them trudge from police station, then hospital to mortuary in the mostly vain hope that they will find them.
Convention does not allow me to reveal the denouement. But I suggest that the terrorists’ final blow came after production. Sotigui Kouyate (Ousmane), who won the best actor award at last year's Berlin Film Festival for his role as the migrant African worker seeking his son, died in April only a couple of months before the film’s release.
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