1981, the dawn of a new era in France: the Socialist candidate François Mitterrand has just been elected president. But while his tiny hometown in Brittany erupts with joy, twenty-year-old Philippe has other things on his mind. He’s obsessed with sound, manipulating tape recordings to make weird effects on his older brother Jérôme’s radio show. And next week he’ll be assessed for compulsory military service. If the army takes him, he might never see Marianne again. Marianne is his brother’s girlfriend, and he’s totally in love with her. It’s hopeless, of course. Or is it? When Philippe leaves to serve with the French forces in Berlin, it’s with a mix tape from Marianne in his pocket. With this feature debut, director Vincent Maël Cardona crafts an evocative time capsule of an era close to us in years but in many ways now remote, when Europe was divided by an iron curtain and a sequence of songs on magnetic tape could serve as a declaration of love. Deploying a stellar soundtrack of European post-punk classics, Cardona juxtaposes the eternal thrills of first love and the frustrations of provincial life with a lovingly specific depiction of a bygone period, lending tremendous emotional immediacy to the lives of those who came of age at the dawn of the 1980s