The Optimist

„The Optimist" is a documentary about the heroic struggle of a man against all odds in the complicated geopolitical space of Central Europe in the first half of the 20th century. Born in 1870 to a Hungarian-Jewish family in today's Slovakia, Lajosz Winter was a man of entrepreneurial genius and unbreakable spirit. He was the founder of the Slovak Balneological Society and a builder and modernizer of the world-famous Slovak spa town of Piešťany. Despite surviving four political regimes and anti-Semitic, anti-Hungarian and anti-capitalist persecution, he remained a steadfast optimist until his death in 1968.