In Gross-Umstadt, a small town in central Germany, we look back to the arrival of a large community of Portuguese workers in the 1960s.
Legend has it that a young Portuguese man who came to Germany on a motorcycle collapsed one day in 1962 in the small town of Gross-Omstadt in the state of Hesse… and never left again. After finding work at a local manufacturer looking for new workers, he would spread the word to his compatriots. A few years later, the city's population was about 2,000 Portuguese out of a population of 12,000. Who was this first Portuguese immigrant, and why did so many others imitate him? Brothers and sister Adolfo, Carlos and Alice arrived in the German city as children. When the parents wanted to return to Portugal after earning enough money to live a better life there, the two eldest decided to stay. The youngest left against her will, before becoming a German language teacher in her native country. Against a backdrop of Super-8 photographs and personal photographs, this poignant documentary traces the fate of families built through migration and multiple identities.
