Synopsis
It’s the story of a long journey, the one of Yaguine and Fodé, two Guineans’ symbols-boys. They wrote – on the behalf of every child and boy from Africa – a letter to “Their Excellences the members and responsible of Europe”. In this letter they’re asking help to have schools, food, medicines, “...as your sons that you love like your own life...”
With their letter in their pocket, Yaguine and Fodè hide themselves inside the undercarriage of a plane directed to Bruxelles and, in this way, their extraordinary travel of hope begins. This travel cross with the tale of another journey, in the opposite direction – from Europe to Africa – ten years later, made by other two symbols-boys and a football. This is Tabo’s story, thirteen years old from N’Dola, an African village in the south of world – he doesn’t know anything more about it – but he wants to go back there, with his very good friend Rocco, fourteen, from Catania, south of that Europe full of contradictions, that calls and rejects peoples from the south of the world, with the same movement of the waves of that sea which joins and segregates us.
These latest boys are victims of the kid football players market, a kind of “meat market”, from which they escaped. Run away from an apparently golden world, but they strongly feel they want to go back to their homes. On foot, playing with a football, their only travelling companion, Tabo and Rocco go through Africa, walking backwards one of those many “shoes trail” made year after year, step after step by those thousands of men, women, kids, escaping from shortages, wars, and from that slow extinguishment of life’s dignity of the entire African continent.
When the airbus 300 by Sabena ends its long flight, landing at Bruxelles, a technician discovers the embraced ice-covered bodies of Yaguine and Fodè; in their pocket their letter addressed to “Their Excellences...” The long journey of Tabo and Rocco ends up too. They arrive at N’Dola, a small village in the equatorial side of Africa. There, in a soccer pitch dedicated to Yaguine and Fodè, they play a match with the rhythm of the African drums, all together, one hundred vs. one hundred, thus celebrating the turn back of a little champion, one of them.