At the beginning of the 1970s, a group of young people are struggling to survive in a bumpy attempt to emigrate illegally. A young man, involved in scams, in debt and persecuted, plays the role of smuggler to exploit a group of young people who, like him, but for different reasons, want to cross the border illegally. After a police chase near the border, a tragic car accident jeopardizes those who have taken him at his word. A girl who wants to reunite with her family, a child she is protecting, a deserter and a revolutionary wanted by the police are the other crew members on this journey. Severely injured by the accident, in need of medical attention and in the crosshairs of a police search, they will have to make difficult choices about who moves on and who stays behind.

O Salto is an original research and dramaturgy project on Portuguese emigration in the 1960s and 1970s, which aims to uncover a period of recent history that, for various reasons, often remains taboo – due to the misery and obscurantism in which it was lived, the oppression of the dictatorship or because it invokes the dissident theme of desertion to the colonial war. A drama that draws on real-life testimonies to record and deconstruct vivid memories of Portuguese history and to construct a tragic extreme situation that pushes the characters – in their struggle for better living conditions – to face death itself and reveal the deepest contradictions of human nature.