‘Will to See’ chronicles writer’s years reporting on warfronts
Prolific author, philosopher and journalistic rock star Bernard-Henri Levy aka BHL was a war correspondent for Albert Camus’ French Resistance newspaper Combat in 1971, covering the fighting in Bangladesh.
Since then, the dashing, well-dressed, Algeria-born Levy, who is married to a French movie star, has reported from many fronts all over the world for such publications as Paris Match and the Atlantic Monthly. In “The Will to See,” a film/ essay Levy co-directed with Marc Roussel, Levy revisits many of the fronts he reported from in the past.
These include Nigeria, where Levy, a founder of France’s New Philosopher movement, tells the story of a young Christian wife and mother, a survivor of an attack by Boko Haram, who lost her family and her arm and later died by suicide.
The film steps from there to Syria and Iraqi Kurdistan, and then Ukraine, where we meet the younger, democratically elected Volodymyr Zelenskyy bewailing the bloody actions of Russia’s Vladimir Putin in the eastern part of his country.
We will also travel to Somalia, Bangladesh, Greece, Libya and Afghanistan. On the fabled island of Lesbos, we meet some of the thousands of refugees from several war-torn countries being held in a camp without a sewage system, where a school was torched by presumed far-right Greeks.
Levy, dressed in a tailored black suit and white shirt surveys the pain and suffering and relishes his
job of telling the often indifferent world about it. In one scene, he takes the names of Algerian boys, who want help getting French passports.
In his few moments on screen, Zelenskyy, circa 2014, says of Putin, whom he had met, that he “has no eyes.” We see the damage
done in the currently besieged city of Mariupol back in 2014 when pro-Russian soldiers tried to take the city. While in Ukraine, Levy is reminded of Babi Yar, the Nazi-era execution and mass burial of over 30,000 Ukrainian Jews.
The director of “Bosna!” (1994), Levy returns to Sarajevo,
30 years after the ruinous Bosnian War and the long siege of the city.
Levy has the appearance and coiffure of a French film star. He was born into a wealthy family. Much of the content of “The Will to See” is affecting. But one cannot escape the feeling that the aristocratic author is on some sort selfcongratulatory miserabalist tour of the world’s dispossessed.
In Bangladesh, Levy visits another refugee camp, this one holding people fleeing the Rohingya genocide in Burma.
In the Libyan city of Misrata, which could only be reached by a 24-hour boat trip, Levy is reunited with “the man who took Tripoli” and laments the actions of “Erdogan’s mercenaries and Putin’s war dogs.” We see the ancient Libyan city and archaeological artifact of Leptis Magna.
In Afghanistan, Levy chases the shadow of a female journalist, a second Shakespearean Juliet, whose father would not allow her to marry outside of her ethnic group, leading to her suicide.
In a Rome shut down by the pandemic, Levy visits the beach in Ostia, and a shrine dedicated to filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, who was murdered there in 1975.
Levy, a Jew, has been a champion of the stateless Kurds, who are Muslim and are renown for their efforts to defeat Isis in Iraq and Syria. Levy also directed “Peshmerga,” a 2016 documentary about them. 70-something Levy even rappels down the side of a cliff in the Barzan Mountains.
“The Will to See” is an eye-opening tour of many of the world’s most desperate places, a self-portrait of Levy in blood, bullets and tears.