She first gives him “Monsieur”, then changes to the informal address. As the letters progress, the complicity, intimacy and passion between the lovers grow. She is Françoise, caregiver, married and mother of two children. Him, Lahoucine, Moroccan worker at Citroën recently arrived in France. From their meeting in 1959, in the hospital, a “not simple” passion was born, adulterous and clandestine.
Years later, when Françoise died, Mehdi Ahoudig found a packet of love letters and decided to tell the beginnings of her parents’ story through their correspondence. In a mixture of sound archives, sound effects, conversations with his sister and his other siblings, born from the marital union, and even his mother recorded a few years earlier, he takes us from the intimate story, to the great history, that of France during the Trente Glorieuses, that also of class borders and immigration, with the Algerian War in the background. “I hope the police don’t bother you,” Françoise wrote to Lahoucine after the 1961 attacks, while deploring racism against Moroccans and Algerians.
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Through the figure of her mother, this woman, unhappy in her first marriage, who chooses to live out this relationship with a foreign lover, younger than her, and who is thrown out of her home, Mehdi Ahoudig also tells the story of the codes, mentalities, possibilities and taboos of the time.
The listener shares this story with Mehdi Ahoudig and his sister who, having seen their parents’ relationship fall apart, could not imagine that they had loved each other so much or the obstacles they had to overcome. “Destroy the letters,” Françoise implores him several times, for fear that their secret relationship will come to light. Lahoucine did not burn the letters. He kept them like a treasure, a testament.
