Antoine arrives in Tangiers from Europe to supervise the building of an audiovisual center in the city’s free zone. He’s in charge of speeding up the construction works, but the secret aim of his journey is to link up with Cecile, who he has continued to love with a silent passion for more than thirty years.
Cecile has forgotten Antoine. She emigrated to North Africa and has been through the ups and downs of married life with Nathan, a Jewish-Moroccan doctor younger than herself. They have a son, Samy, who lives in Paris.
When the story begins, summer is ending and Samy arrives at his parents’ place with his girlfriend Nadia, who is raising a child fathered by another man. Samy and Nadia are a chaste but solid couple. Allies against adversity, they protect each other in order to pursue their separate passions. Nadia must learn to put distance between herself and her twin sister, Aicha, at the cost of a brutal fight with her demons. Samy must learn to reconcile his attraction to Bilal with his tenderness for Nadia.
Calm doesn’t reign among this family group on vacation; Cecile feels restless and starts questioning her life. What once seemed close and important to her now seems foreign.
Meanwhile, alone and rich and far from life’s whirlwind, Antoine, the ghost, stakes his claim for the immutable love, his ideal – still intact and definitive – he feels. A prisoner of his gentle madness, is he invulnerable? Does he really believe in everything he says? It’s only a dream, Cecile, the realist, replies.
And yet, unbeknownst to them, perhaps the dream will become reality.