The Witnesses

Summer 1984. Twenty years old Manu arrives in Paris looking for a job and sharing a cheap hotel room with his sister Julie. He strikes up a joyous and chaste friendship with extroverted and cultivated Adrien, a wealthy gay doctor in his early fifties, who opens Manu’s eyes to a different way of life. During a boat trip Adrien introduces Manu to Sarah and Mehdi, a happy young couple who have just had their first child. An unplanned love affair, the onset of the AIDS epidemic displayed by the media and the collective imagination as a shameful, modern-day plague will shake up the tranquillity of their individual destinies. Each of them becomes a protagonist in - and witness to - a contemporary tragedy, where those who don’t die may emerge stronger, but not undamaged.