A young Arab boy, a teenager "Yaouled", who lives on the streets and scrapes by doing odd jobs: shoe shining, street vending, etc. The film tells the story of a group of yaouleds from the Bab-el-Oued neighborhood, caught in the crossfire between the French settlers on one side and the Algerians on the other during the events of July 1962 in Algeria.

After a conviction for theft, Merwan was expelled from France, where he had lived since the age of one, to Algeria, his country of birth. In a foreign country of which he knows neither the language nor the customs, he finds himself stripped of his belongings and on the street.