We know almost nothing about these men and women who decide to leave their homes for the European Eldorado. This documentary is about these "adventurers".
Even with several thousand illegal immigrants under threat of expulsion because of the Sarkozy memo, thousands more risk their lives each day to get to the doors of Europe. France 5 offers a documentary on this issue [this week].
Director Sébastien Deurdilly flew to Africa to meet immigration candidates. He spent several months with the men and women in Senegal, Mali, Algeria and the Canary Islands who call themselves "adventurers".
He wanted to find out and understand the reasons these men and these women are willing to put their lives on the line to get to Europe, to find out how they prepare for the great adventure, ready to die rather than not meet the needs of their families left behind, to move closer to the very people that abuse them the most.
In the town of M'Bour in Senegal, out-of-work fishermen, modify their boats to become human traffickers, and mothers fight to keep their children from leaving.
On the border between Mali and Algeria, Deurdilly was able to enter the "Republic of Illegal Immigrants" for the first time, a no-man's land out in the middle of the desert where illegals have created a state with its own laws and even its own president.
In the Canaries, with the highest number of daily arrivals from the African continent, and in France, the adventurers talk about their discovery of "Eldorado" and the contrast between their dream and reality. They talk about their disappointment and their regrets. The dream they had constructed of Europe doesn't match up to what they hoped to find.