Nicolas Thibault

An immersive film essay on tennis legend John McEnroe at the height of his career as the world champion, documenting his strive for perfection, frustrations, and the hardest loss of his career at the 1984 Roland-Garros French Open.

At the beginning of the 60's, thousands of Portuguese turned up in France through the underground. They were fleeing misery, war and repression. Left to unscrupulous smugglers, they had to cross the Iberian Peninsula tracked by the Portuguese and Spanish police. For many, the voyage towards France turned into a disaster. As a child in a shantytown, the author remembers having heard about these terrible odysseys. Thirty years later, he goes in search of the stories of his childhood and seeks to understand what sparked this unprecedented emigration known as the "plebiscite by foot" against Salazar. Between childhood memories and historical investigation, he looks for the images of this exodus, the largest in post-war Europe.