In 1950, in Algeria, in a village in Kabylia, Algerian resistance fighters resisted the French occupation army. Bachir returns to the village to escape the clashes ravaging Algiers. In Thala, he has two brothers, Ali and Belaïd. The first is engaged with the ALN (The National Liberation Army) and fights against the colonizer. His second brother, Belaïd, the eldest, is convinced of a French Algeria. His family torn apart, Bachir decides to join the war and takes sides against the repression of the French army. The French army is trying in vain to turn the population against the insurgents by using disinformation. The more time passes, the more the inhabitants of the village and surrounding areas, oppressed, rally to the cause of the FLN, their houses and their fields will be burned... Adaptation to the cinema of the eponymous novel Opium and the Stick, published in 1965, by Mouloud Mammeri, the film was dubbed into Tamazight (Berber), a first for Algerian cinema.
While he tries by all means to stay out of the bloody upheavals caused by the battle of Algiers, Hassan, an honest and naive father, unknowingly offers hospitality to a mujahid actively sought by the army. French. A series of events and misunderstandings quickly catapult him to the forefront, presenting him under the pseudonym “Hassan Terro”, a great fictitious terrorist who would have sworn the doom of the French army...
Mustapha, a cab driver in Paris, charges a customer in a hurry, without realizing that he is in a hurry to escape his pursuers after robbing a jewelry store. The next day, reading the newspapers, Mustapha becomes aware of the role he has played in this affair, and would gladly assist the police if a fortuitous incident didn't make him fear the criminals' vengeance. It's a cruel dilemma in which he is both suspected by some and threatened by others. Weak but honest, he manages to get out of this predicament at the risk of his life!
A young doctor is hired, with a friend, to work for an old miser whose garden contains a treasure. In love with the old man's daughter, the doctor wants to prevent her from marrying the old man who is promised to her. To do this, he must be rich and he must absolutely find the treasure.
Town trollop Safia, much against her better judgment, falls in love with Matteo, a beggar and mystic in the native quarter of Sirocco. She flees to France, first as the mistress and then wife of a wealthy archaeologist, and bears him Matteo's child, whom he believes to be his own. Complications arise years later when Matteo finds Safia, and a ring of blackmailers uncover her past and exposes her to her husband.