Des hommes debout

On a Paris street corner stands a little shop containing three phone booths which migrant workers from the Middle East use to talk to their distant families. The owner serves coffee and cake over the counter, and we overhear the men chat in Arabic about their families, their work, and their daily lives. The sentiments shared in this gathering place for immigrant men resonate with Moustafa’s conversations with his family in Algeria – to whom he will return for the first time in fourteen years – and with letters the director’s father wrote to his family in Lebanon long ago. The nostalgia they bring makes it feel as though time has stopped.
“Time seems to be suspended as these men mill around and chat. I observe them in this space, a small land that has become the Paris branch of ‘home’, their great native land. Moustafa is one of them. Our lives differ, but we share the same condition.” (Maya Abdul-Malak)