SIMON LEYS, THE MAN WHO UNDRESSED MAO

His name is unknown to the general public and yet, with the publication in 1971 of his book The Chairman’s new clothes: Mao and the Cultural Revolution, Simon Leys became to Maoist China what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would become, two years later, to the Soviet Union with The Gulag Archipelago: the man who tore away the veil of illusion.

Simon Leys, born Pierre Rycksmans, was the first and most lucid denouncer of Maoist crimes, which led to the deaths of nearly 70 million people. 

This film draws a triple portrait. That of a Belgian writer and sinologist, 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 recent political history.