Indochina, 1945. While the French are harassed by both the Japanese army and the Vietnamese rebels, private Robert Tassen, driven by the memory of a tragedy of which he is the only survivor, embarks on the search for the mysterious and cruel Võ Bình Yên, one of the leaders of the insurrection.
In 1971, António Lobo Antunes' life is brutally interrupted when he is drafted into the Portuguese Army to serve as a doctor in one of the worst zones of the Colonial War – the East of Angola. Away from everything dear he writes letters to his wife while he is immersed in an increasingly violent setting. While he moves between several military posts he falls in love for Africa and matures politically. At his side, an entire generation struggles and despairs for the return home. In the uncertainty of war events, only the letters can make him survive.
The armies of Fascist Italy conquered Addis Ababa, capital of Abyssinia, in May 1936, thus culminating the African colonial adventure of the ruthless dictator Benito Mussolini, by then lord of Libya, Eritrea and Somalia; a bloody and tragic story told through the naive drawings of Pietro Dall'Igna, an Italian schoolboy born in 1925.
The story of Ramiro, a young boy, who is leaving to war; his return and his missing with the love of his life, Laurinda.
On March 29, 1947, peasants armed with sticks and knives attacked the French garrisons in Madagascar. The revolt would end twenty months later with the death of the last insurgents, shot down by the expeditionary force. France, accustomed to memory lapses, knew nothing of this insurrection and its trail of torture and abuses. In Madagascar, well after independence, the events of 1947 were never discussed. For more than a generation, parents refused to speak of them to their children. It wasn't until the 1980s that the silence was broken.
The history of decolonization from the point of view of colonized peoples, an epic story that still resonates and reverberates to this day.
