Opium is an evocative name, with 'mephitic' or heavenly aromas, depending on how you look at it. 

In 1851, with the publication of "Paradis artificiels" (Artificial Paradises), Baudelaire published and freely adapted "Confessions d'un mangeur d'opium" (Confessions of an Opium Eater), an autobiographical account that Thomas de Quincey, an English economist, essayist and philosopher, had written thirty years earlier. In describing this experience, far from glorifying it, Baudelaire describes the journey of the "opium addict poet" as he frees himself from the tyranny of opium and its derivatives. He triumphs in this account through the founding act of consciousness that he achieves in the limpidity of his formulas: "you are barely standing when an old remnant of drunkenness follows you and delays you, like the ball and chain of your recent servitude".

An actor, Redjep Mitrovitsa, in front of a cenacle of fifty spectators, gives his confessions all the light of Baudelaire's texts. Beside him, Thomas de Quincey, represented by a Lilliputian doll, abandons himself to the mists of opium in his little puppet theatre. In the distance of his set, he sees the history of this trade, crudely destroying the Orient of his dreams...

While a certain folklore has retained only the names of decadent romantic artists looking for inspiration in a back room, behind this curtain of tawdryness lay the realpolitik of the colonial empires. This second face is inseparable from the first: the French and British imposed the opium trade on China by force of arms. By the end of the 19th century, one-fifth of the Chinese population was opium addicts and the Chinese Empire, on its knees, was no more than a territory enslaved to Western trade rules.

"Opium" takes us on a journey from a poet's confession to a world without illusions, where only the cynicism of the powerful dictates the rules. History and poetic paradise battle for a slice of reality.