From the 1950s until the 1970s, more than 60,000 workers from southern Morocco, most of them illiterate, were recruited to work in the coal mines of Nord-Pas-de-Calais on six-month, one-year or eighteen-month contracts.
These mines, which were doomed to close in the 1980s, needed a docile, inexpensive and, above all, disposable workforce. The man in charge of selecting the recruits in southern Morocco was a former member of the colonial armies, Félix Mora, who had previously been a "native affairs officer".
The film traces the life of this very special recruiter and the thousands of families whose lives he changed, for better or for worse. Some of the recruited miners returned to Morocco; others remained in France, fighting hard to obtain the right to bring their families over.
The film aims to restore the memory of this "chosen immigration" whose chief craftsman, Mora, was nicknamed "the slave trader" because he checked the teeth and muscles of his recruits before applying a coloured stamp to their torsos...