Bruno Dumont drew attention with his first film, La vie de Jésus (1997), a realistic portrayal of the miserable existence of people in a small town north of France. His second film, L'humanité, also takes place in Bailleul, the nondescript Flanders town of the previous film, and the hero of this film, Pharaon De Winter (Emmanuel Schotte), is also a loner who lives with his mother. Their house was owned by Pharaon's grandfather, a famous painter. The opening scene shows Pharaon walking in a freshly plowed field. He throws himself onto the moist soil to feel it and to smell it. Thirty-year-old Pharaon, a simple and unsophisticated man, has a crush on his sexy neighbor, factory worker Domino (Severine Caneele), a gentle soul in love with a brute named Joseph (Philippe Tullier). Pharaon's daily life is quite dull; he is a police lieutenant, a job that does not agree with his mild temperament in which he has to investigate the rape and murder of a little girl. What makes Pharaon different from others is the suffering he goes through due to his uncontrollable empathy for other human beings. He is an emotional sponge condemned to carry the burden of all our wrongdoings. He is hungry for human feeling to the point that he would smell the face of the suspect he interrogates. In the final analysis, he also is a Jesus figure, like the hero of the first film. The message is that there is no place for such figures in our cruel world. L'humanité won the Grand Prize of the 52nd Cannes Film Festival in 1999. Severine Caneele shared the Best Actress award with Emilie Dequenne of Rosetta and Emmanuel Schotte won the Best Actor award.