Summary

The Spring of Exile is the story of three men who fled Portugal in the 1960s because they refused to be drafted into a colonial war. They met in Paris and actively participated in the May 68 movement. Through the story of their struggles against the Salazar dictatorship, they tell the story of the country where they came from, the oppression that raged in Portugal. After the fall of the dictatorship on April 25, 1974, they returned to Lisbon. In the archives of the PIDE, the all-powerful political police, we find their names: José Mario Branco, Vasco de Castro and Fernando Pereira Marques. The traces of their songs, their plays, their diaries and drawings, found in the archives in France, bear witness to the fight they waged against fascism.