At the beginning of the 70s, Jean Genet is in Tangier, he is in his sixties and he no longer writes. He lives in the El Minza hotel, a palace, where he spends entire days reading, smoking and sleeping (he takes Nembutal, a barbiturate used as a sleeping pill). He only goes out at the beginning of the afternoon to have a coffee with milk in one of the bars of Petit Socco. 

He sometimes meets the young Moroccan writer Mohamed Choukri there. Their discussion is banal, friendly. Sometimes they talk about literature. Genet no longer writes, but is still inhabited by it.