With his latest film Fevers, awarded the Grand Prize—the Etalon de Yennenga—at FESPACO in 2015, Hicham Ayouch explores the boundaries of human emotion, a project he began with his earlier film Cracks/Fissures (2009). In the earlier film the director’s handheld camera tracked the three main characters so closely that it seemed to embody three points of view simultaneously. In Fevers Ayouch adopts a somewhat different, yet equally fascinating, narrative and aesthetic frame to tell his story.

The film begins with close-up shots of the back of an adolescent boy’s head as the camera tracks him through an outside corridor into a dark hallway, trying to keep up with his feverish pace. Extreme close-ups follow as the boy, Benjamin, insists to an off-screen social worker that he will go to live with his father, Karim, now that his mother is in prison. This decision unleashes a series of disconcerting scenes probing notions of family, home, and the father–son relationship. Benjamin’s father, a Maghrebian immigrant, is an unmarried laborer who lives with his parents, Zohra and Abdelkader Zeroubi, in the Parisian suburb of Noisy-le-Sec. Abdelkader protests that he does not have the strength to care for a grandchild, but he is silenced by Zohra, who calmly declares that she will welcome her grandson.

Benjamin’s integration into the family is rocky at best. Abdelkader’s “discipline and punish” views on child rearing clash with Karim’s patience and desire to understand his son as the boy commits a series of delinquent acts: smoking, drinking beer, tagging the apartment block’s walls and doors with red spray paint, burning the family Qur’an, breaking the maquette of the family’s homestead in the Maghreb. Benjamin’s actions violate the Muslim beliefs of his family members, who themselves seem less than fully integrated into French society. Peace and liberty for Benjamin come via his friend, the marginalized Claude, and the moments spent in his trailer in the woods where Benjamin finds acceptance. But does Claude really exist or is he imaginary, one of many escape mechanisms for Benjamin, increasingly depressed in a household ruled by a grandfather who insists that his son resort to corporal punishment for his grandson? Headphones that block out the world and graffiti painting provide other moments of respite for Benjamin.

One of the ongoing themes in the film is the tension in father–son relationships over issues of masculinity. For example, at the beginning of the film a shame-faced Karim confesses to Abdelkader that he didn’t know he had a son, and Abdelkader tells him to “be a man.” Similarly, Benjamin challenges his father’s manhood when he attempts to hit Karim’s boss. Afterward Karim is livid, shouting that the child’s actions have put his livelihood in jeopardy, and Benjamin retorts, “You are not a man!” The crisis point comes midway through the film when Benjamin attempts to stab his father and the two scuffle on the apartment balcony as Benjamin taunts Karim to push him over the edge. But Karim come to his senses and instead begs his son’s forgiveness, and from this moment on the family embarks on a journey of tolerance and understanding, albeit with difficulty. Most important, they begin to speak previously unspoken truths, which express not only the importance of tolerance, but also of responsibility. For example, Karim takes his son to visit his institutionalized brother, Hekel, and admits to Benjamin that he had caused the accident that incapacitated Hekel. The film ends with Benjamin’s solo visit to his uncle as he pushes him in his wheelchair. In the final shot Benjamin is holding a knife and looking out the window of Hekel’s room as intense sunlight streams through—leaving the viewer to wonder if Benjamin has stabbed Hekel to put an end to his suffering.

According to Will Higbee, Carrie Tarr, and others, the “cinéma de banlieue” label often used to describe films about Maghrebi-French experiences in Parisian suburbs glosses over religious, ethnic, and national differences and leads to the suggestion of a “homogenous” community, but Ayouch avoids the use of this term. Instead, Fevers is a masterful study of characters’ inner lives and their emotional arcs, examined mainly through their gestures and facial expressions and studied in close-up. In this sense, the style and content of the film are also light years away from the didactic social realism of Maghrebi films of the 1970s and ’80s. In Fevers, many scenes, shot with blue and gray filters, show characters trapped in bleak prisonlike spaces between the vertical lines of the low-cost, rent-controlled HLM (habitation à loyer modéré) buildings they inhabit. When the Zeroubi family begins to bond and explore difference, this vertical architecture begins to function as a visual metaphor in a different way—as a representation of father and son united against the world. In one scene Ayouch infuses touches of humor as Benjamin, his father, and grandparents, having abandoned the dining room table, are finishing their meal on the apartment balcony. Lined up on chairs with their backs to the camera, each is eating a slice of pizza as they discuss the fact that the family would never before have considered eating pizza or allowed Benjamin to eat ham. Ayouch suggests that integration, if ever possible or desirable, comes at a cost, and that there is still much work to be done.