The Age of Czesław Miłosz
A documentary commemorating the 100th birthday of Czeslaw Milosz, the Nobel Prize-winning Polish-Lithuanian poet. Famous cultural figures, friends, and family retrace the life and work of this extraordinary thinker, joined by Milosz’s own words and a wealth of archival material. Born in a cross-border region of Lithuania in 1911, Milosz grew up a polyglot, fluent in Polish, Lithuanian, Russian, English, and French. During World War II he wrote for underground presses. Surviving Nazi rule, he went on to serve as a cultural attache of Poland in Paris. In 1951, he defected to the West and wrote his most famous prose work, The Captive Mind. By 1960, Milosz had emigrated to the U.S. to teach at the University of California, Berkeley. With the fall of the Iron Curtain, Milosz returned to Poland, where he passed away in 2004 at the age of 93. This film is a lyrical reflection on a life spent in exile yet filled with humor, passion, and big ideas that often went against the spirit of the age.