The story of Abdellah’s coming of age in two parts — first as a teenager in Morocco, the second as a university student in Geneva. Inspired by the filmmaker’s own autobiographical novel that carries the same title, Salvation Army is as much a film about inhibition, hypocrisy, brutality, and shame as it is about desire, love, dignity and survival.

In Casablanca, the young Abdellah spends his days at home, living a relationship of conflicts and complicity with his father. In the city streets, he has occasional sexual intercourses with men. During a holiday, his older and venerated brother Slimane abandons him. Ten years later. Abdellah lives with his Swiss lover, Jean. He leaves Morocco and goes to Geneva, where he decides to break up and to start a new life alone. He takes shelter in a house of the Salvation Army, where a Moroccan man sings a song of his idol Abdel Halim Hafez for him.