A French-Algerian college student, Karim (Karim Tarek) decides to create a documentary about homosexuality in North African countries. Ostensibly straight, and living with his pensive girlfriend Siam (Sihem Benamoune), Karim is initially resistant to the flirtations of his interviewees, particularly Farid (Farid Tali), an air steward who eventually draws him on a fateful trip to Morocco, where Karim discovers his own homosexuality and the pair visit Jean Genet's seaside grave.

This very disappointing movie trawls through its seventy minutes in a dreary, aimless way that makes it seem like a much longer film. Later scenes are indistinguishable from earlier ones, as pairs of Arabic guys talk existentially about their sexualities and Karim continues to insist that he is straight. There's only so much idle chat about coming out of the closet and feeling marginalised one can listen to and stay interested, especially if the film festival wine bar is pumping free booze out in the foyer, and you're trapped inside the cinema sitting through a movie like this one.

The no-budget cinema verite style - the film is made to look like Karim's assembled mini-DV footage - makes for little visual interest which is astonishing considering the potential beauty of a film made on location in Paris, Tangier and Marrakesh.

It's a shame that The Road To Love gives North African experiences of homosexuality such short shrift, and again, given that this is a base note of the movie, this is a strange and inexplicable omission. Male-male sex in the Maghreb is an ancient and complex set of practices and customs that make modern, American-based gay identities look embryonic. Why shove the former aside to privilege the latter, so we can see our doe-eyed hero finally make up his mind to come out and be a happy, shiny gay boy back on the streets of Paris?

This film works as an interesting door-opener to the subject of North-African guys living in the West and trying to put some sort of workable combination together out of their varied strands of identity. But it really doesn't look like any more than an audition tape for a film that may be made properly at some later stage.

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