A chillingly realistic portrait of a lost youth in Algeria, characterized by poverty, violence, drugs, and unemployment. Aimlessly, Omar finances his life through pilferages and street robberies in the city of Mostaganem. His mother maltreats him with outbursts of violence, his sister prostitutes herself, and Omar suffers from his inability to act. He regularly numbs himself with the synthetic drug »Madame Courage« that gives the adolescents the impression to be invincible. Only when he meets the young girl Selma on one of his raids, a glimmer of hope begins to take root. Allouache addresses the contradictions of an erosive society expecting the fulfillment of traditional norms and roles from its men without offering them any scope for evolvement.

http://www.alfilm.de/en/program/madame-courage/