Film premiere of “The Will to See” challenges Americans to re-engage with the world’s dangerous, desperate places.
After Afghanistan, America must not retreat from the world, says the famed French journalist Bernard-Henri Lévy, a man so famous in France that everyone from taxi drivers to diplomats refers to him simply as “BHL.” Like the similarly named shipping company, BHL delivers. He gives audiences intimate portraits of Afghan warlords, Nigerian gunmen and tough-minded Iraqi monks in his new film, The Will to See. Its U.S. premiere is Thursday at the French embassy in Washington, D.C., and Yale University Press published his book on Tuesday. BHL saw gaunt, haunted faces of Libyans still mourning their relatives, lying in mass graves, Uyghur Muslims who have been displaced and dispossessed by Han Chinese communists, and the sad, resigned faces of hopeless Arab refugees on the Greek isle of Lesbos. Nigeria could be the next Rwanda, he said, and a key test for the administration of Joe Biden. Rwanda, the site of a 1990s genocide, was faulted as a major failing during the Clinton years and a “problem from hell” by former U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power. Today, Biden has put her in charge of the U.S. Agency for International Development. The U.S. and France only woke up to Rwanda “when the genocide was over,” BHL said in Paris during an interview with Zenger. “In Nigeria — I’m very careful, but we have the seeds, the start of a possible genocide. But this time we can stop it.” It’s not Hutu vs. Tutsi, he said. It’s radicalized Muslims creating “daily bloodbaths of Christians in Nigeria, who are killed with the complicity of the army, just because they are Christians.
