Total Kheops

A Feature film of

Alain Bévérini

Produced by

Ognon Pictures

Production year2002

French release03/07/2002

Runtime1 h 30 min

Synopsis

Marseille today… Its smells, streets, working-class neighborhoods, cafes, the sea. Marsille and its gangsters, old ghosts who sometimes meld with newcomers, those of the extreme right who worm their way in and take over the terrain. Marseille, twenty-five-years ago, when Fabio, Manu and Ugo, all sons of immigrants, joyfully mispent their youth with Lole, a girl they were all in love with.
Three big teenagers from the tough Panier district, three friends “till do us part” who decided one day, more for bravado’s sake than from any real impulse, to hold-up drugstores. It was a matter of living fast and furious. It was a carefree, easy life filled with sleepless nights and parties – until it all went wrong. Their paths then separated.
Time has passed. Manu has become a small-time thief and big-spender, a macho living with Lole. Ugo has split, ridding himself of his illusions in some faraway place. And Fabio, he’s become a cop, a strange kind of cop, part teacher, part social worker.
The story begins when Manu gets out of prison and Lole comes to pick him up. Their happiness is short-lived: after a robbery, Manu is killed by someone on a motorbike. Fabio meets up with Lole at his funeral and the past rises slowly to the surface, stirred by the memory of a kiss they shared a few years earlier.
When nothing goes right, Fabio sticks close to his shack in the Goudes. He gets his bearings in his fishing boat and thanks to the tender loving care of his neighbour, Honorine, who’s been a mother to him since he was a kid.
Then, Ugo turns up to revenge Manu. Without batting an eye, he kills Zucca, Godfather of Marseille’s mafia, before being shot himself… All hell breaks loose and Lole disappears.
Fabio, the only survivor, wants to get his hands on the person who’s caused the death of his childhood friends. Ugo left him some pointers and, in the name of friendship and loyalty, Fabio can’t let him down. Alone and way outside professional boundaries, Fabio starts hunting for the killers in a city where the extreme right is in cahoots with the Mafia, where old gangsters and corrupt cops cause terror to reign. At his own risk, Fabio will avenge his friends while also shaking up the underworld strategies of today’s Marseille.