The Notorious BHL: Bernard-Henri Lévy on Peshmerga and the Fate of the World

Long hailed as France’s most famous – and controversial – public intellectual, Bernard-Henri Lévy has been making waves through his writing and speaking (and outsized personality) since his early days in the “Nouveaux Philosophes” movement over four decades ago. In recent years, though, BHL (like RBG he’s a media darling with a hip acronym) has been lauded for turning his penetrating gaze to filmmaking. Just this past November Lévy received the American Media Abroad Award for Peshmerga and The Battle of Mosul, a pair of companion docs he directed that eloquently focus on the Kurdistan region, specifically its people’s importance in the fight against ISIS.

Awhile back I had the good fortune to meet with BHL – who’s currently on a US media blitz hawking his latest book “The Empire and the Five Kings: America’s Abdication and the Fate of the World” – during the Copenhagen International Documentary Festival (also known by its hip acronym CPH:DOX) where both films were screening. Over early morning coffee at the elegant French embassy in the center of town he enthusiastically answered a wide range of questions, beginning with the obvious: Why on earth, after decades of being a Parisian man about town, return to the dangers of covering combat that he dove into during his youth?

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