La Petite cuisine de Mehdi

Mehdi is living a precariously balanced life: he pretends to be the perfect Algerian son to his mother Fatima while hiding his relationship with Léa and passion for French cuisine and wine, which he pursues by working as a chef in a bistro. When Léa can no longer tolerate his secrets and concealments and demands to meet her mother-in-law, Mehdi finds himself backed into a corner.

COMMENTARY
Populated by a diverse group of very human characters, this comedy of misunderstandings is a mix of love and cuisine, ethnicities and generations, flavours and feelings.

DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT
My first film is both an act and a declaration of love. It is fuelled by desire, as is every creative act. My dual Algerian-French citizenship influences everything I write; perhaps that is why I wanted this love to also be dual, ambivalent, rooted in two cultures. Without otherness, there can be no transformation; I believe in encounters that have the power to transform, genuine encounters that demand otherness.
These days, however, we are becoming more insular: there is a severe lack of otherness. I am passionate about the world of cooking. It is a powerful cultural arena, which I even find to be cinematic, closely linked to affection and memory with its sensorial nature. It all adds up.