Sleeping Children

France, 1981. A small rural village is gripped by an epidemic of heroin usage. Désiré, once the pride of the family, has become one of its many ‘sleeping children’, found slumped, unconscious, in the street. Against all odds, Désiré’s family desperately try to save him from the lure of addiction as his life descends into chaos. But something else lingers on the horizon, approaching fast. Far away in Paris, alarm bells are ringing. A race across the globe is beginning, urgent to make sense of a deadly new virus, one that will come to define a generation. But within the statistics, documents and landmarks lie the tragic stories of families torn apart, never told, fading slowly into obscurity. Here, then, is the story of Désiré.