SIMON LEYS, THE MAN WHO UNDRESSED MAO

The name Simon Leys is unknown to most of the population.

And yet, with the publication in 1971 of his major book Les Habits neufs du président Mao, this immense Belgian intellectual became to Maoist China what Alexander Solzhenitsyn would become two years later to the Soviet Union with The Gulag Archipelago: the man who tore the veil of illusion over Maoism and its crimes.

The film is a threefold portrait: that of Simon Leys, who had the misfortune to know China; that of the Cultural Revolution he was witnessing; and finally that of the Maoist movement in France, one of the most appalling moments of intellectual blindness in our recent political history.