La diagonal Alekhin

At the age of forty-seven, the world chess champion Aleksandr Aleksándrovich Alekhine, Russian by birth and French national, plays games the way he lives his life: from victory to victory, from continent to continent. He runs the month of September 1939 when he embarks in Buenos Aires for Europe with his wife and the porcelain vase that has not left him since, as a teenager, he received it as a trophy from Tsar Nicholas II. . The man whom composer Harold Schonberg described as "more immoral than Richard Wagner and Jack the Ripper" has no other concern than the revenge that has been denying his eternal rival, Cuban Capablanca, for twelve years. However, in Paris he awaits a letter calling him up, while the Reich urges him to join his cause and create a chess school for future German generations. At a time when everything can still be decided on the board, the chess genius makes a resolution that will make him a hostage to the new masters of Europe and a collaborator of Hans Frank and Joseph Goebbels. Little by little, the pieces of his own masterpiece -his wife Grace and Spielmann, Rubinstein, Przepiórka: the great persecuted Jewish masters, once his best rivals- will fall one after another.