His director's debut work, O Salto, was the first film to have Portuguese immigration in France as its theme. It's a fiction that mixes amateur actors and real immigrants, and shows the conditions in which emigration took place "on a leap". Once in Paris, a young cabinetmaker is surprised to discover that the friend who had encouraged him to emigrate wants to exploit him and demands a percentage of his meagre salary. The man had no choice but to submit to a profession that was not his own and to go into the closed world of the slums. "Chalonge asks serious questions like who doesn't want the thing. He manages to give an impression of the truthfulness of life as it is, with simple gestures" (Gilles Jacob, Les Nouvelles Littéraires). Presented once at the Cinemateca, in 1993, O SALTO will be shown in a session held with the support of Fafe's Museum of Migration and Communities.

See the complete interview with Christian de Chalonge, conducted by Inês Espírito-Santo in a partnership between the association Mémoire Vive/Memória Viva (Paris) and the Observatory of Emigration here.