Isaiah Berlin: Philosopher of Freedom

“Isaiah Berlin, philosopher of freedom”, a 72 minute documentary completed in 2018, traces Berlin’s intellectual development in the context of his life and times, through archival film and recordings of its subject, and interviews with his biographer Michael Ignatieff, his principal editor Henry Hardy, and pianist and writer Alfred Brendel, among others. From Berlin’s early life in Riga, to his family’s move to London in 1921 when he was 11, through his own recounting, we trace his personal and intellectual development. During the War, Berlin worked for the British Diplomatic Service in Washington and in 1945 in Moscow. There he encountered Anna Akhmatova who changed the course of his life. He departed from more technical philosophy, embracing the history of ideas. The film traces his major contributions to the philosophy of freedom, his studies of Russian thinkers, especially Herzen, Tolstoy in his “Hedgehog and the Fox”, his early study of Marx, his essays on Liberty and Romanticism.