In his powerful My Father Is an Engineer, renowned director Robert Guediguian offers a socially and politically engaged observation of race, humanism and social ideals in a changing world.

Doctors Natacha (Ariane Ascaride) and Jeremie (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) have been sweethearts since childhood, their lives intimately connected by love and profession. But while the idealist Natacha is committed to Marseilles' working-class, mixed-race district of L'Estaque, Jeremie has sought the broader world of Paris and politics.

The film opens with the couple arriving in Marseilles for Christmas: she the Virgin Mary and Jeremie her Joseph in a modern-day retelling of the birth of Christ. But this allegory is merely an imagining of Natacha, who, mute and inert, has spiralled into a state of catatonia. News of her ill health brings Jeremie back to Marseilles, where he attempts to find the cause of her unforeseen malady. What he discovers is a mesh of intolerance, hypocrisy, betrayal and failed dreams, linked to forbidden love between a young white girl and an Arab boy.