The Will to See

"The Will To See"

An old-time war reporter, Bernard-Henri Lévy is sent by a group of newspapers to bear witness and report from places in the world where suffering and misery is at it's peak, where wars are going on under our noses, where the world's destiny is being determined and no one, it seems, is paying attention. An unflinching look at the most urgent humanitarian crises around the globe.

Since 2014 and Ukraine's Maidan revolution, Donbas, an important mining region of eastern Ukraine), has fallen prey to an armed conflict between pro-Russian separatists in the pay of Putin and the Ukrainian army. This now no longer under-the radar war had claimed over I 3,000 victims prior to Russia's official invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Nigeria is Africa's wealthiest and most populous country and here a slow-motion war is under way, a massacre of Christians, massive in scale and horrific in brutality. And the world has hardly noticed. Comparing the violence and persecution executed by Islamic terrorist groups in Nigeria to Rwanda in the 1990s and to Darfur and South Sudan in the 2000s. Will the West let history repeat itself in Nigeria?

Named the worst refuge camp in the world without Borders, Moria, the infamous reception center, on the Greek island of Lesbos, was constructed for 2,000 refugees but until last year, housed nearly 20,000 souls. With horrific and inhumane conditions, the camp was a tragedy waiting to explode and that it did. In September 2020, the camp burned to the ground. Independent since 1960, the country has been ravaged by endless wars over decades. The capital, Mogadishu, has become a hotbed for violence and terrorism. AI-Shabab, the Islamist group affiliated with Al-Qaeda, has wreaked havoc on the country and few Westerners have been back since the tragedy of Black Hawk Down. In 20 I I, Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown by a NATO-led international coalition including the United States, the United Kingdom and France.

After 20 years in Afghanistan, the United States and it's allies concluded this forever war and the floodgates opened for the Taliban to retake the country. Now with devastating humanitarian, political and economic consequences, severe restrictions on human rights and a dark cloud descending over the country, the son of legendary Commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, young Ahmad Massoud holds the sole flame of resistance in the Panjshir VaIIey. The leader of the Resistance against the Taliban regime, Massoud continuously calls for international support but has yet to receive help. Numbering 30-40 million, the Kurds are the world's largest stateless nation and are divided between Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran. Oken terrorizing and repressing the Kurds, these countries will not sacrifice an inch of territory to create a Kurdish state. When lsls extended it's Caliphate throughout Syria and Iraq, the Kurds led the fight, with their Western allies, to extinguish this terrorism, horror and chaos. But when Erdogan invaded their small autonomous region in Syria, the international community leh them in the dust and at the mercy of powerful and hostile neighbors. Now the Kurds of Iraq and of Syria continue to combat and suppress dangerous flare-ups from lsls, which has not disappeared, and are alone in this baxle against extremism.

"The Will To See" brings publicity to unfashionable political causes. For bearing witness to the horrors of the world. The movie challenges viewers to examine their prejudices and preconceptions. The film is a damning indictment of a selfish and callous Western world. It raises questions that are rarely posed so starkly. The ability to act, the drive to inspire. Calls on people not just to see the world, but to be moved and interested by what they find there, and to do something about it. "The Will To See" seeks big answers to impossible questions on humanity, brotherhood, and the concept of just and unjust war.

This movie is a mixture of circumstance and necessity. It's about the idea of seeking out forgotten wars, situations with little coverage, places of suffering and misery where it's difficult to go and where. The film believes in the virtue of the field. You see absolutely incredible things that escape all the grids of reading and interpretation. Moments of loneliness, the Kurds, whose tragic greatness is obvious. The quintessential ghost town, rotten town, putrid town, Mogadishu. It's a trip to the end of hell. The camera very often lingers on faces. All the misery, the splendor, the horror, the glory of the human condition. Radical Islamism is currently the ferment of many conflicts. It's a threat to freedom and a reservoir of crimes against humanity. Beauty, on the other hand, of the luminous faces of those who resist, as in Afghanistan! The film shows the face of those who refuse that radical Islamism dictates its law to them, to the rest of Islam and to the world.

The camp of the polluters is already overwhelmed with the miseries of the world. There's a kind of inner evidence. The film gives an epic, even romantic vision of these conflicts. 'Oh god, war is pretty' says Apollinaire. By romanticism, we mean the ineradicable belief in a better world, or the idea that there's in every man a path to greatness, or the fact that a man can always do a little more than what one imagines. By the way, is this so different from the classic attitude of the committed intellectual? Since the Dreyfus affair, isn't a French intellectual someone who only authorizes himself to affirm, I've the duty to say what's right, what's good, what's the truth. Waking up at night, when the battlefields are still smoking, the fights are over, the winners are designated, the vanquished lost. There are two colors in the film. Tiredness. The moments we've the feeling, of having spent our life plowing the sea. But there are also real moments of pride.

Written by Gregory Mann.