The Other Evening

Paris, June 1998, the day of the World Cup semi-final between France and Italy. The city is smouldering with hatreds. The fear in the air is palpable. Skinheads and Neo-Nazis are on the rampage. Giacomo Flores, a reporter for a prominent Italian daily paper, is moments away from meeting his grown-up, pregnant daughter Francesca, and his wayward son, Gianni, and a little later, Louis, his divorced wife's third child - and most important for him, Pauline herself - though not until the evening. But arrangements unravel before any meeting takes place. There is a stabbing. Giacomo witnesses it and becomes involved with the police. Gianni sees his father being driven off with them. Francesca and Gianni do meet but, as violence erupts all around, he hustles her into a shop, leaving her there ostensibly to look for young Louis. But he is drawn by the presumed revolutionary potential of the situation, and joins a group of Kurds fleeing from both the skinheads and police. For several hours, each member of the family lives out their individual responses to the turmoil all around them, yet in their thoughts they keep coming back to what should have been happening, and to the family's broken history... and whether or not any kind of reconciliation can be brought about after their thirteen-years' estrangement.