Time Out

In the late 1960s, Charles Thomas was one of the most electrifying players in Spanish basketball. As a top scorer in the national league and a key figure at FC Barcelona, he seemed destined for a long and celebrated career. Then injury intervened, and with it came a slow unraveling that his friends and teammates could only watch from a distance.

By 1980, Thomas had disappeared entirely. For four decades, those who knew him assumed the worst. No obituary, no trace, no explanation.

Then a phone call arrived.

Thomas was alive, living in a care home for people with disabilities in Amarillo, Texas, after years spent adrift far from the courts and the city that had made him famous. Director Fèlix Colomer Vallès set out to find him, and in doing so, to understand what had happened in the years between glory and silence.

Time Out is a patient, searching portrait of a man whose story fell through the cracks of sporting memory. It asks difficult questions about what professional sport offers its athletes and what it leaves them with when the career ends, not on their own terms, but suddenly, and without a farewell.