Spirit of Freedom

4 programs

Television rights and prices on request

Bernard-Henri Lévy, eminent writer, essayist and thinker, and well-known personality, wrote and presents this account of this century's most influential intellectuals, their attempts to foster their visions of freedom, and the confrontation of their ideals with historical and political reality. Their story is intricately intertwined with the evolution of the twentieth century.

The term `intellectual' covers writers, poets, artists and scientists, who through their work, writings and public stances have committed themselves to their ideals, and in so doing have substantially shaped the history of our age. They have travelled the world in search of the absolute, espousing revolutionary causes, navigating between truth and lies, often triumphing, often stumbling.

Spirit of Freedom retraces their steps, from the Dreyfus Affair, which captured public opinion at the turn of the century, the Bolshevik Revolution, the rise of Fascism, Stalinism and Nazism, through the turbulent 1960s, the Cultural Revolution in China, the Vietnam War, and Third-World rebellions. Emile Zola, André Gide, André Malraux, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Lenin, Stalin, Castro are among the protagonists of the series; Claude Lévi-Strauss, Claude Lanzman (director of the film `Shoah'), Regis Debray, who was Che Guevara's comrade-in-arms, Klaus Croissant (lawyer of the infamous Baader-Meinhoff Group) are among those interviewed.

Rich archival footage, interviews, voice-over narration and on-location filming vibrantly bring these events, and the people who made them happen, to life. BHL accompanies viewers on an odyssey from Paris to the USSR, Berlin, Algeria, Beijing ... Each episode focuses on one specific wave of thought in its historical and chronological context.