Farida is back in her father’s native Algeria for the first me since she was a child. She discovers her grandmother’s house in the middle of the countryside. When the night comes, her sleep is disturbed by an intruder, a strange creature which has been haunting the family for many years.

Based on Lord Byron's poem "Mazeppa" from 1819 and revolving around the painter Théodore Géticault, famous horse trainer and spectacle Bartabas takes art to another level.

Jahwad is thirty years old and going nowhere fast. He flunked out of school, and slipped into petty crime. Now, he has the police on his tail. So Jahwad is no longer going nowhere, he is getting out of town as fast as he can. He hitches a ride with a schoolteacher, who is desperate at being posted to one of the toughest high schools in the Paris suburbs. The man is so frantic, he rams his car into a tree. For Jahwad, the opportunity is too good to miss, but the high school dropout hardly looks the part.