The city of Sète, on the harbour. more. With sensitivity and grit, THE SECRET OF THE GRAIN celebrates the role food plays in family life and gets to the core of contemporary immigrant experience. What were you expecting, Napoleon's toenails? On the night in question attendance is high, although notable by her absence is his long-term partner, Latifa. In this 2010 interview, French film scholar Ludovic Cortade, author of “Le cinéma de l’immobilité,” discusses the themes and style of THE SECRET OF THE GRAIN. AKA: Couscous, Grain and Mullet, La graine et le mulet. The Secret of the Grain (French: La graine et le mulet), titled Couscous in the UK, is a 2007 Franco-Tunisian drama film directed by Abdellatif Kechiche. Rent/Buy. Their comments turn nasty and they turn on the waitressing girls. "The Secret of the Grain" is the wrong title for this movie. Latifa uses the opportunity to slip off the boat and return to the hotel to start a new pot of couscous. At the restaurant, the sons unload the metal cauldrons and the women serve wine and appetisers to the waiting guests. “The Secret of the Grain” is a film with a lot on its mind. In England, it opened as "Couscous." Buy. The women start to heat up the food when they notice the absence of the couscous. The Secret of the Grain (2007) forces us to rethink what a French film can be and what a French family can look like. He also gets an electrifying performance out of Herzi, playing a young woman whose tenacity and devotion to … Subscribe. But it isn’t expressed through his careworn protagonist, Slimane (Habib Boufares), who works in a shipyard, and whose every wrinkle bespeaks the hardness of life in Sète, a Southern coastal town ground down by unemployment. When they come back on, Rym stands before the assembled diners in a red belly-dancing outfit. The Secret of the Grain (French: La graine et le mulet), titled Couscous in the UK, is a 2007 Franco-Tunisian drama film directed by Abdellatif Kechiche. Verified Purchase. That anger, which was submerged beneath the dazzling role-playing and banlieue locutions of his first two films as director, pervades The Secret of the Grain. The Secret of the Grain. Get unlimited DVD Movies & TV Shows delivered to your door with no … Rent The Secret of the Grain (2007) starring Habib Boufares and Hafsia Herzi on DVD and Blu-ray. The Secret Of The Grain stretches out at the relaxed pace of a seven-course meal, but at the end of it, Kechiche has squeezed the most he can out of percolating dramas within the family and he lets the audience get to know its members without needing to throw them all a subplot. When Slimane Beiji, divorced, in his sixties, and of Algerian origins, is made redundant after working for years on a shipping wharf, he acts on his wish to open a portside restaurant. The two ingredients constitute both the staple of his extended family's diet and the menu on which he plans to establish his restaurant. Slimane's son Majid, whilst surveying the crowd, notices a bureaucrat's wife with whom he has had several illicit sexual liaisons and decides to leave quietly. Director Abdellatif Kechiche's The Secret of the Grain begins as something of a social-issue movie about outsourcing and productivity eclipsing quality, and ends as a humanistic but unsentimental film about self-sacrifice and the complexities of family loyalty. France . Also marketed as "Couscous", this Franco-Tunisien production gives a good insights to a North African family living in France. Sign In. The Secret of the Grain: original title: La graine et le mulet: country: France: sales agent: Pathé International: year: 2007: genre: fiction: directed by: Abdellatif Kechiche: release date: BE 12/12/2007, FR 12/12/2007, IT 11/01/2008, NL 17/04/2008, UK 20/06/2008, DE 04/09/2008, ES 30/01/2009: screenplay: Abdellatif Kechiche: cast: Wider in scope and significantly larger in scale than Blue is the Warmest Color, The Secret of the Grain portrays the interpersonal drama and struggles of an Arab-French community in Sete, France. At the port of Sète, Mr. Slimani, a tired 60-year-old, drags himself toward a shipyard job that has become more and more difficult to cope with as the years go by. Watch for FREE. Trailer. Although the English title of the film suggests there is some secret held by the grain, the only secret in Secret of the Grain is how Kechiche manages to seamlessly weld together into a cohesive whole such disparate elements as the traditions of great cooking, the problems immigrants confront when dealing with white authority, and the desire to leave a legacy to your children. The Secret of the Grain IMDB: 7.4 At the port of Sète, Mr. Slimani, a tired 60-year-old, drags himself toward a shipyard project that's become increasingly more difficult to manage with as the years proceed. The Secret of the Grain. Knowing that it will take at least another hour to cook a new batch, they continue to frantically call Majid and attempt to call Souad, who is out searching for an unfortunate in need of plate of couscous. He runs after them, but every time they stop to mock him they move on before he can catch up to them. By Robert Davis | December 24, 2008 | 9:00am. Made by Abdellatif Kechiche, a Tunisian-born filmmaker who immigrated to France at the age of six, the film follows a Tunisian-French family in Sète, a … The guests, talking amongst themselves, begin to speak both positively and anxiously about the likely success of the restaurant, now concerned that it may draw custom away from the other restaurants in the area. Movies Reviews Abdel Kechiche. He instructs his brother to tell the rest of the family that he has gone to help a friend who has broken down on the highway. Habib Boufares Hafsia Herzi Farida Benkhetache (2007) A family rallies around its tired father to make his lifelong dream come true. The winner of four César awards, including best picture and director, Abdellatif Kechiche’s The Secret of the Grain is a stirring drama about the daily joys and struggles of a bustling French-Arab family. The Secret Of The Grain - Couscous. This excerpt from an episode of the television series “20 heures” features interviews with director Abdellatif Kechiche, actress Hafsia Herzi, and residents of Sete, the location for THE SECRET OF THE GRAIN, as they celebrate the film’s awards at the 2008 Cesars. The following interview with director Abdellatif Kechiche was conducted in March 2010. As Rym dances and sweats, her mother walks up the gangplank with a new cauldron of couscous, whilst Slimane continues to chase the youths around the apartment building. Share Tweet Submit Pin. In this 2010 video portrait, the musicians from THE SECRET OF THE GRAIN discuss their integral role in the film. Synopsis. Directed by Abdellatif Kechiche • 2007 • France. Sign In. [6], sfnp error: no target: CITEREFMorris2010 (, "La Graine et le mulet (The Secret of the Grain) (2007)- JPBox-Office", "LA GRAINE ET LE MULET (THE SECRET OF THE GRAIN) (COUSCOUS) (2007)", "Metacritic: 2008 Film Critic Top Ten Lists", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Secret_of_the_Grain&oldid=994378591, Films whose director won the Best Director César Award, Films whose director won the Best Director Lumières Award, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, Best Original Screenplay: Abdellatif Kechiche, Best Director (Eurasia Film Festival): Abdellatif Kechiche, Marcello Mastroianni Prize (for actor or actress in a début role): Hafsia Herzi, SIGNIS Award - Honorable Mention: Abdellatif Kechiche, This page was last edited on 15 December 2020, at 12:10. The French title, LA GRAINE ET LE MULET aka The Seed and the Mullet refers to the culinary specialty, a couscous with fish, the hero of THE SECRET OF THE GRAIN wants to propose in his restaurant. In the dining room the guests, despite the attempts of the women to placate them with assurances and date liqueur, become extremely restless. The winner of four César awards, including best picture and director, Abdellatif Kechiche’s The Secret of the Grain is a stirring drama about the daily joys and struggles of a bustling French-Arab family. The Secret of the Grain (French: La graine et le mulet), titled Couscous in the UK, is a 2007 Franco-Tunisian drama film directed by Abdellatif Kechiche.The film stars Habib Boufares as an aging immigrant from the Maghreb whose ambition to establish a successful restaurant as an inheritance for his large and disparate family meets sceptical opposition from the French bureaucracy. Undaunted, Slimane enlists his sons to help with the renovation and arranges an opening gala of a large dinner party, to which he invites the many bureaucrats on whose decision the fate of the project rests, in an attempt to demonstrate the viability of the enterprise. Finally he sinks to his knees, before collapsing flat on the ground, unmoving. He's divorced and doing all he can to stay close to his family. Secrets of the Grain “The Secret Of the Grain” refers to the Tunisian dish of couscous. It takes will, courage and determination to realise a dream. Slimane takes his motorbike out to Souad's apartment building to find her. Abdellatif Kechiche’s stirring drama deals with the daily joys and struggles of a bustling French-Arab family. With Rym's enthusiastic help, Slimane applies for the relevant licences and loans, but soon finds himself knee-deep in bureaucratic red tape. With sensitivity and grit, The Secret of the Grain celebrates the role food plays in family life and gets to the core of contemporary immigrant experience. [4], Wesley Morris, film critic for the Boston Globe, writing for the Criterion online accompaniment to the film, notes that the film is “essentially a portrait of an extended family whose dynamics are steadily reframed in a collection of long, eventful scenes.” The cast get to play “actual people—not symbols, inmates, nannies, or the undignified other,” and “their concerns have little to do with overt oppression or xenophobia.” He praises Abdellatif Kechiche because the “narrative in this film is secondary to human nature...” He calls the belly-dance in final sequence “complexly conceived and realized, and says “the dancer uses sex and cultural exoticism to distract tables of formerly civilized but suddenly restless white natives.” Kechiche “invites us to acknowledge a fundamental truth about Arabs—or any people of color—in the history of the movies: stereotypes sell.” [5], Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival, 2007, The film was released in the Criterion Collection in 2010. Directed by Abdellatif Kechiche • 2007 • France The Secret of the Grain subtitles. The Secret of the Grain. At the port of Sète, Mr. Slimani, a tired 60-year-old, drags himself toward a shipyard job that has become more and more difficult to cope with as the years go by. Slimane Beiji (Habib Boufares) is the divorced head of a Franco-Arabic family living in Sete. The winner of four César awards, including best picture and director, Abdellatif Kechiche’s THE SECRET OF THE GRAIN is a stirring drama about the daily joys and struggles of a bustling French-Arab family. The French title of the film refers to a "grain of couscous" and to mullet, a type of small fish, both popular in Tunisian cuisine. This 45-minute featurette is director Abdellatif Kechiche’s reedit of Rym’s belly-dancing sequence in THE SECRET OF THE GRAIN, a 2010 visual and aural interpretation of the film’s passionate climax. Start Shopping. The Secret of the Grain Ta plats kring middagsbordet Ett franskt familjedrama med en sällan skådad täthet och äkthet. A. O. Scott of The New York Times named it the 3rd best film of 2008,[4] Andrew O'Hehir of Salon named it the 6th best film of 2008,[4] and Scott Foundas of LA Weekly named it the 7th best film of 2008 (along with A Christmas Tale). Determined to leave a legacy for his beloved family, and encouraged by his long-term partner's daughter, Rym, (Hafsia Herzi) he pursues his dream of converting a dilapidated boat into a family restaurant that will specialise in his ex-wife's fish couscous, a meal that she prepares for the entire family every Sunday. Panic mounts when they discover that it is definitively absent and Majid, who has taken the car that still holds the metal cauldron in the trunk, is not answering his phone. The film stars Habib Boufares as an aging immigrant from the Maghreb whose ambition to establish a successful restaurant as an inheritance for his large and disparate family meets sceptical opposition from the French bureaucracy. Slimane has worked in the same shipyard job for over 35 years, when his growing dissatisfaction prompts him to try to open his own restaurant. The musicians play for her and she entrances the guests with a fervent performance, charged with youthful, sexual energy. Couscus makes itself known as the centerpiece of a meal gathering generations of a family at the dinner table every Sunday in Sete, a seaside town in southeastern France feeling the heat in the recession of the shipping and fishing industry. The secret of the grain in the title is the ability of a woman named Soaud (Bouraouia Marzouk) to make couscous out of it. The film stars Habib Boufares as an aging immigrant from the Maghreb whose ambition to establish a successful restaurant as an inheritance for his large and disparate family meets sceptical opposition from the French bureaucracy. 4.0 out of 5 stars The Secret of the Grain. Watch for FREE. Starring Habib Boufares, Hafsia Herzi, Faridah Benkhetache. Rent. Summary: The Secret of the Grain is a touching and resoundingly humanistic story set in the rustic port of Sete in southeastern France. When he cannot find his ex-wife, Slimane leaves the apartment building to find his motorbike stolen. The culprits, three young boys, sit atop the stolen bike on the other side of the river, mocking him. Starring Habib Boufares, Hafsia Herzi, Faridah Benkhetache. La Graine et le Mulet. The only secret involving the grain is why it's so late being served. Insulted and threatened by the involvement of Slimane's ex-wife in the project, the restaurant's cook and creator of the pivotal fish couscous, Latifa refuses to leave her hotel. The Secret of the Grain For its first thirty minutes or so, “The Secret of the Grain” looks like it’s going to be another European arthouse flick about nothing in particular. As he is being forced out of his job at the local shipyard, he interacts in a series of extended vignettes with various members of his extended family including his ex-wife, his sons and daughters, their husbands and wives, and his grandchildren. Classics and discoveries from around the world, thematically programmed with special features, on a streaming service brought to you by the Criterion Collection. "Couscous" är fullkomligt trollbindande. In this 2010 interview, actress Hafsia Herzi, who plays Rym, discusses the making of THE SECRET OF THE GRAIN. The winner of four César awards, including best picture and director, Abdellatif Kechiche’s THE SECRET OF THE GRAIN is a stirring drama about the daily joys and struggles of a bustling French-Arab family. Monsieur Slimani, a broken-down man of sixty, is still working at the shipyard, the job getting harder as the years go by. It has the texture of a documentary but a classic, almost Shakespearean structure: when patriarch Slimane acts on his wish to open a portside restaurant specializing in his ex-wife’s couscous and fish, the extended clan’s passions and problems explode, leading to an engrossing, suspenseful climax. This 2010 interview features actress Bouraouïa Marzouk, who plays Souad in THE SECRET OF THE GRAIN. … Tensions in the dining room reach a peak and Rym decides to step in. Rym pleads with her to attend, encouraging her to use the opportunity to flaunt her comparative youth and beauty in front of Slimane's ex-wife, and eventually she concedes. The Secret of the Grain holds an 83/100 on Metacritic[2] and a 92% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with the critical consensus stated by the latter aggregator as, "A complex portrait of an immigrant family, The Secret of the Grain is a sprawling, intimate film with many fine performances. But most of all it takes family. Watch The Secret of the Grain (2007) - Comedy, Drama Movie: At the port of Sète, Mr. Slimani, a tired 60-year-old, drags himself toward a shipyard job that has become more and more difficult to cope with as the years go by. The Secret of the Grain (French: La graine et le mulet), titled Couscous in the UK, is a 2007 Franco-Tunisian drama film directed by Abdellatif Kechiche. In France, where it was honored for best film, director, screenplay and most promising actress, the title translates as "fish couscous." She whispers to the musicians, and suddenly the music stops and the lights go out. Reviewed in the United States on May 1, 2013. There’s a swirl of characters with a swirl of problems, none of which seem particularly solvable or interesting. Having prepared the couscous, fish, vegetables and sauce in large metal cauldrons, Slimane's ex-wife sends the food to the boat with her sons and leaves her apartment to find a 'poor man' so that she can donate a plate of food that she habitually reserves for the less fortunate. "[3] The film appeared on several critics' top ten lists of the best films of 2008. In this community, food plays the mediator and bassline of … The film stars Habib Boufares as an aging immigrant from the Maghreb whose ambition to establish a successful restaurant as an inheritance for his large and disparate family meets sceptical opposition from the French bureaucracy. Also marketed as `` Couscous '', this Franco-Tunisien production gives a good insights a. Abdellatif Kechiche • 2007 • France starring Habib Boufares ) is the title. 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