Nefta Football Club is a 2019 Tunisian-French short film (17 minutes), directed by Yves Piat.
Two men in the desert somewhere close to the Algeria/Tunisia border have lost a donkey. Salim asks if Ali did what he was supposed to do and Ali says yes, he put the headphones on the donkey's ears and gave it a smack on the butt. Apparently this did not work, as Salim and Ali are searching frantically.
Meanwhile two young brothers, Mohammed and Abdallah, are zipping around the Tunisian side of the border on a moped. Mohammed, the younger child, says he has to stop to pee. As Abdallah waits by the roadside with the moped, his younger brother climbs to the top of the hill, and finds a stray donkey with headphones over its ears. The donkey has a haversack, which is stuffed with plastic bags...and each plastic bag is full of a white powder.
Tropes:
- Answer Cut: Aballah is bringing the two guys from the motorcycle shop to see the drugs. One asks "How big is the bag?" Cut to little Mohammed, who is having some difficulty lugging the bag onto the dusty field where he plays soccer.
- Fingertip Drug Analysis: Mohammed does this by accident, thinking the white powder is flour. After he tastes it he guesses laundry detergent. Abdallah, who knows exactly what the powder is, brings one bag to some grownup hoodlums he knows, who do the fingertip thing on purpose.
- Flyaway Shot: The film ends (except for The Stinger) with a flyaway shot, the camera zooming up into the air as it shows Mohammed and his buddies below, playing on their heroin-lined soccer pitch.
- Foreshadowing: It's established that Mohammed loves to play soccer, but he and his buddies wind up arguing a lot because they play on a barren sandy field with no lines. The film ends with Mohammed using all the heroin to draw the boundary lines for a soccer pitch.
- MacGuffin: The haversack full of heroin loaded onto the back of a donkey, which comes into the possession of two children when two Stupid Crooks let the donkey get away.
- Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure: Salim tells Ali that the donkey was trained to come back when it heard Adele's "Someone Like You" over the headphones. When Salim yells "Haven't you ever heard of Pavlov?", Ali answers back that if he hasn't heard of Adele, he definitely hasn't heard of Russian singers.
- Shout-Out: Salim has trained his drug mule (fine, drug donkey) to forage for food and then come back when it hears "Someone Like You" by Adele.
- The Stinger: At the very end there's a cut back to Salim and Ali, still arguing and fighting in the desert.
- Stupid Crooks: Salim's plan was to train a donkey carrying a large load of heroin to go into the hills and forage for food, and then return, when hearing "Someone Like You" by Adele on a set of headphones. This was not a good plan, as demonstrated when his buddy Ali plays a song by a singer named "Hadel" instead. The other two crooks, Mohammed and Abdallah, are also stupid as Abdallah did not explain the situation, and Mohammed did not get the allusion that the white powder is something more than laundry detergent.
