Babylone Films

Toby and his sister Liz live with their aunt and uncle, who take in Cambodian orphan Hoang while he awaits foster placement. The trio become fast friends, and, as they explore a nearby wood, encounter a retired engineer living in an abandoned freight car. Playing off Toby's already active imagination, the kids and the engineer use the train car to make a fantastic journey to Cambodia.

Directors Jean-Henri Roger and Juliet Berto begin this thriller with sequences on the contemporary politics of southern France and the infiltration of organised crime into real estate development there: crime bosses were torching forest tracts to make way for their development schemes in the early 1980s. In the fictionalised story, Paula Barretto is caught in this underworld because her father was involved in the drug business, her brother is in the real estate scam, and her lover is an armed thief. Although she tries to get out of her corrupt and dangerous environment, it is not an easy task when even the police officers cannot be trusted, and the underworld has informants everywhere.

Creuzeville, a small provincial town with its woods, its countryside, its ramparts, its mass and its little Sunday cakes. A stranger arrives. He's a private investigator in Creuzeville, over which an old family of industrialists reigns, a murder has just been committed. The victim is the founding ancestor of this small empire that has outgrown one man. In Creuzeville, we hardly like foreigners, especially if they are vegetarians, perhaps homosexuals, undoubtedly anarchists like, precisely, this detective. However the detective by whom the scandal broke broke the silence of the city by going to the heart of family secrets hitherto well hidden behind purple shutters. The murders follow one another. We strike on the left - a young ecologist - as on the right - a cynical playboy. Continuing to dissect the mobiles and the characters, the detective dropped the masks one by one. And, little by little, fear and violence are settling in the small town.