A documentary film on the life and work of the great poet Paul Celan with interviews with his son, Eric Celan and his French editor, Bertrand Badiou.
It is in Czernowitz, in Bucovina, in the current Ukraine, that Paul Antschel was born on November 23, 1920. Of Jewish culture and German language, from a region attached to Romania and then to the Soviet Union, he will be uprooted all his life. After a romantic and anarchist adolescence, he studied medicine in Tours when the Second World War broke out. Both his parents died in deportation, and he himself survived the labor camps. From Vienna, where he met the writer Ingeborg Bachmann, to Germany - which he called his "land of anguish" -, from Israel to the École normale supérieure in Paris, the wandering poet always kept the scar of horror, which deeply marked his writing: he never stopped "putting into words the extremities of the human experience". Haunted by the shadow of the tortured, he went through several depressive phases, and finally killed himself at the age of 50 by throwing himself into the Seine.
With readings of his poems and comments by his son Eric and his editor Bertrand Badiou, this moving portrait traces the career of one of the greatest post-war poets, torn between literary recognition and the incomprehension that surrounded the survivors.