Commissioned by the Centre d’animation culturelle of Montbéliard, Armand Gatti observed the town of the Peugeot factories where France’s second largest workforce was concentrated and almost 10,000 immigrants of different origins.
A French Jew and a German communist political prisoner are locked up together in a barbed wire enclosure. A kapo and an officer promise freedom to the one who kills the other by the end of the night. The two camp commanders call it an experiment and make a bet.
Like Columbus who discovered America and changed the course of history, the ‘other Christopher Columbus’, Cristóbal, a shipwrecked mariner from the Mediterranean, discovered America anew in twentieth-century Cuba, where the course of history was again to be changed.