THE INCORRIGIBLE OPTIMISTS CLUB PB – JEAN-MICHEL GUENASSIA-EUAN CAMERON

Paris, 1959. As dusk settles over the immigrant quarter, 12-year-old Michel Marini – amateur photographer and compulsive reader – is drawn to the hum of the local bistro. From his usual position at the football table, he has a vantage point on a grown-up world – of rock n roll and of the Algerian War. But as the sun sinks and the plastic players spin, Michel s concentration is not on the game, but on the huddle of men gathered in the shadows of a back room… Past the bar, behind a partly drawn curtain, a group of eastern European men gather, where under a cirrus of smoke and over the squares of chess boards, they tell of their lives before France – of lovers and wives, children and ambitions, all exiled behind the Iron Curtain. Listening to this band of survivors and raconteurs, Michel is introduced to a world beyond the boundaries of his childhood experience, a world of men made formidable in the face of history, ideas and politics: the world of the Incorrigible Optimists Club.