BBC Documentaries

Poet on the Frontline (2015x60)

: 21, 2015

A window into the incredible and dangerous world of daredevil war correspondent and author Ryszard Kapuscinski. One of the most important literary voices today, Kapuscinski has spent his life trying to stay alive on foreign battlefields and struggling to stay published in the face of censorship in his native Poland. Known as 'Indiana Jones with a notepad', he is a legend among his peers, a man who has been looking for the truths of human experience in the most dangerous places. Film-maker Gabrielle Pfeiffer travelled with Kapuscinski to four countries, capturing his true character, his passion, his humour and his demons. Her film unfolds in an engaging episodic format, in which the echoes of Kapuscinski's childhood as a war refugee interweave with his later experiences on the battlefields of the third world, in a poetic reverie of the tragedy and the absurdity of war.