The film opens with a scene rendered through hand-drawn Japanese-style animation in which eighteen-year-old identical twin brothers, Antoine and Quentin, flee from their father's bakery and dodge a train on their way out of their native village in France.

While collecting hay bales in the fields, Quentin is befriended by another young laborer named Hakim, who offers him pot and initiates a clandestine sexual relationship.

Resuming his cross-country odyssey alone, Antoine crosses a thickly-wooded vale and briefly glimpses what he thinks is his brother, but racing down a hill falls and cracks his head against a stone.

A middle-aged woman finds him with bugs crawling over his face and brings him to her remote cottage, where she violently bathes him and later performs a brusque handjob on him as he sleeps.

In the early 2000s, director Pascal-Alex Vincent heard a report of adolescent twins in the aristocratic French neighborhood of Marais with a penchant for street brawling.

Vincent first cast them in a short film called Bébé Requin, which competed at Cannes in 2005, and later built the screenplay for Give Me Your Hand around their real-life druthers for violent wrestling.