The Age of Czeslaw Milosz

Epic and intimate as befits its subject—the Lithuanian-born Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, who spent four decades in Berkeley—this film sweeps us into a lyric childhood that was never far from his thoughts, even as he faced down a chaotic century in his poems and exquisite memoirs. Milosz was born in exile (“When he dreamed, he dreamed of Lithuania”) and lived through two world wars and a revolution, and exile again. Through it all he was said to have maintained his faith. After all, he had language, and something like hope: “The poet remembers,” he warned in a 1950 poem. “You can kill one, but another is born.”