Samia (Lynda Benahouda), an Algerian teenager, has immigrated with her large family to the Southern French town of Marseilles, where she must cope on a daily basis with both racism and her family's own restrictions on her personal freedom. She gets a particularly hard time from her older brother ,Yacine (Mohamed Chaouch), who has decided to make himself the unwelcome -- and violent -- protector of Samia's moral and physical virtue. Yacine grows even more unreasonable after Samia's father is hospitalized and it becomes apparent that Samia's sister Amel (Madia El Koutei) is in a relationship with a French boy. Under so much pressure from her family, Samia becomes increasingly rebellious. She refuses to be passively servile -- hanging out with a freewheeling girlfriend, flirting with a boy who wants to date her -- and when her suspicious family forces her to go to a gynecologist to establish her virginity, Samia takes action, rebelling in such a way that nothing will ever be the same again.~ Rebecca Flint Marx, All Movie Guide