The Incorrigible Optimists Club

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 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. 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.