Les mille vies de Jorge Semprun

n the occasion of the centenary of his birth, this documentary revisits the trajectory of the writer Jorge Semprún, survivor of Buchenwald, clandestine communist leader and Spanish Minister of Culture, whose destiny embraces that of the 20th century.

“You will be a writer or a politician,” his mother prophesied. Jorge Semprún was both, and much more. Born in 1923 in Madrid, into an upper-middle-class family committed to republican ideas, he fled the Spanish Civil War with his family and entered the prestigious Henri-IV high school in Paris in 1939. At the age of 20, the young resistance fighter was arrested by the Gestapo and deported to Buchenwald, where he joined the communist cells. Having given up writing on his return from the camps ("The decision to forget leads to the decision not to write"), he worked as a translator and rose through the ranks of the Spanish Communist Party (PCE), notably in charge of reconstruction. clandestine networks under the name of Federico Sánchez. After The Great Journey, published in 1963, and his exclusion from the PCE, Jorge Semprún devoted himself entirely to writing, between autobiographical stories and screenplays – he was nominated for an Oscar for The War Is Over by Alain Resnais and Z by Costa. Gavras. Spanish Minister of Culture from 1988 to 1991, in the socialist government of Felipe González, he made European construction the last intellectual battle of his life.

Writing and life

Interspersed with abundant archives, interviews with relatives (his grandson Thomas Landman, his friend Bernard Pivot...) and specialists (the biographers Soledad Fox and Franziska Augstein, the essayist Alain Minc...), but also with remarkable animated sequences illustrating extracts from his stories, this documentary reviews the thousand lives of this fierce anti-fascist, who made his memories, constantly brought back to the book, the material for his literary work. From exile to celebrity via clandestinity, Albert Solé thus composes a captivating portrait of Jorge Semprún, a major witness of the 20th century who died in 2011, whose centenary of birth is celebrated in December.