Le Bruit, l'Odeur et Quelques Étoiles
Éric Pittard
2002 - 106 min - Super 16 mm - Couleur - France, Belgique

On a cold winter’s night, a young teenager was killed at point blank range by a policeman during an attempted robbery. This 17 year old kid was called Habib and all his pals in the development where he lived in Toulouse nicknamed him Pipo. The death of Pipo is the starting point of this film.
When the tragedy was announced, the housing scheme erupted into violence : four days of rioting, very great police repression. When the emotion and anger cooled, a group of young people, parallel to the judicial enquiry, tried to claim justice until the moment when this group of pals, weary of all the promises not kept, entered a spiral of folly which was to lead them from the development to prison.
This film is the story of this adventure which begins with the death of Pipo. It is told and enacted by the boys and girls who really lived through these events. There are songs sung by Zebda, quite simply because songs say with poetry and force what everyday words cannot always express. This film is built like an opera, with a prologue, three acts and an epilogue. The characters are the actors of life in this Toulouse housing development. The singers and musicians of Zebda play the role that the Greek chorus and the narrators had in traditional operas, with texts by Magyd Cherfi (Zebda’s lyric writer), to recount the memory of the wounded lives.