The Secret of the Grain

Abdellatif Kechiche's The Secret of the Grain (2007) swept the Césars, winning Best Film and Best Director, and took a Special Jury Prize at Venice. Its vivid, immersive portrait of a North African immigrant family in the south of France confirmed Kechiche, later the Palme d'Or-winning director of Blue Is the Warmest Colour, as a major chronicler of contemporary French life.

Habib Boufares plays Slimane, the weary patriarch whose restaurant dream becomes the family's collective gamble, and Hafsia Herzi gives a breakout performance as his fiercely loyal stepdaughter. Kechiche shoots in long, densely peopled scenes of overlapping talk, boisterous family meals and fraught negotiations, and lets them run until the viewer is living inside the rhythms and pressures of working-class immigrant life. The extended sequence built around the restaurant's chaotic opening night became famous for how long it sustains its near-unbearable tension.

Reviewers praised its energy and its authenticity, and the way it sidesteps every cliché the subject invites. It has since been recognised as one of the key French films of its decade, and for us it is one of the defining works of twenty-first-century French cinema. Sprawling and intimate, and emotionally exhausting in the best sense, The Secret of the Grain turns a modest tale of a family business into an epic of dignity, labour and belonging. Herzi's performance and the opening-night sequence were both celebrated from the moment the film was released, and neither has lost any of its force.