Macadam Stories 2015

The film unfolds across a dim, nocturnal landscape inside a weathered apartment complex, where a broken elevator becomes the stubborn fulcrum of three intertwined lives. In the foreground, the dull middle-aged Sterkowitz stubbornly refuses to pay for the repair, clinging to a prideful independence that shadows every corridor and stairwell. The building’s residents are summoned to cover the cost, yet he negotiates a harsh settlement: he is exempt from paying on the condition that he never uses the elevator again. It’s a quiet victory—until tragedy strikes. Soon after, [Sterkowitz] finds himself injured and confined to a wheelchair, a turn of fate that redefines his relationship with the world he once navigated freely.

From the moment the rule changes, he engages in a precarious nocturnal routine. He secretly uses the elevator, slipping through the building’s dim spaces to grab food from the hospital vending machines in the quiet hours of the night. When a night-shift [L’infirmière] discovers his scheme, he crafts a lie with a practiced ease, claiming to be a photographer scouting locations. The lie becomes a lure; an unexpected attraction begins to pull him toward the nurse. Night after night, he returns in his wheelchair, drawn by a connection that grows beyond the fabrication of a career, until a simple offer—would she allow him to take her picture?—tempts her curiosity and she agrees to the portrait. Yet the very thing that has fueled his nights—venturing out of the elevator and into the hospital’s silent halls—takes a precarious turn when the same broken elevator strands him once more. In a desperate scramble, he drags himself to the hospital, only to face a moment of brutal honesty: he is not a photographer, and the truth of his loneliness lingers longer than his fabrication.

Parallel to this, a teenage boy named Charly lives under the weight of a mother who is often away, leaving him with long stretches of solitude. Into the neighboring flat moves [Jeanne Meyer], a woman whose past as an actress has faded into depression. The newcomer is a stark presence in the building, and her temperament clashes with Charly’s quiet loneliness; she struggles to tolerate him, finding his company difficult to manage, while he navigates the fragile line between supervision and isolation. The arrival of Jeanne Meyer casts a new light on the everyday rhythms of the hallway, transforming a row of apartments into a space where tension rests beside fragile, unspoken care.

A surreal twist of fate arrives when a return capsule carrying astronaut [John Mackenzie] crash-lands on the building’s roof, a misstep that compels NASA to act quickly. The agency asks a practical and compassionate Algerian immigrant, [Madame Hamida], to shelter the stranded man for two days until rescuers can retrieve him. The capsule’s landing throws the residents into a complex web of care and concealment. Madame Hamida treats the astronaut as if he were her own son, preparing couscous, sharing her home, and lending him her son’s room and clothes while her real son is in jail. Language becomes a tender barrier—John’s English barely travels beyond a few phrases, while Madame Hamida’s French and Arabic keep them from always understanding one another—but their interactions gradually warm into a surrogate mother-and-son bond.

Across these threads, the film captures the quiet resilience of strangers who inhabit the same scaffolding of life. The building’s corridors echo with small refusals and compromises, moments of tenderness and miscommunication, and the stubborn insistence on dignity in the face of circumstance. The trio of stories—Sterrkowitz’s coping with isolation, Jeanne Meyer’s fragile re-entry into ordinary life, and the astronaut’s fragile shelter from a modern, bureaucratic world—together sketch a portrait of urban life where dependency and humanity cross paths in the most unlikely of places. The result is a patient, observant, human portrait of connection in a place where everyone is hoping to find a way back to normal—whether through a whispered confession in a hospital hallway, the uneasy coexistence of neighbors, or a stranger who becomes family in the span of a few tense days.