Sardine, ten, lives with her family in a village in Picardy. On the day of her sister's wedding, she fights with her family to allow her big brother, Ben-Hur, twenty-five, mentally and physically handicapped, to take his natural place for the ceremony : that of the head of the family who gives the bride away.

The story of an immigrant woman struggling against old world traditions. Zouina leaves her homeland with her three children to join her husband in France, where he's been living for the past ten years. In a land and culture foreign to her, Zouina struggles against her mother-in-law's tyrannical hand and her husband's distrustful bitterness in an attempt to adjust to her life in exile.