Arena — Season 1, Episode 242: From an Immigrant's Notebook: Karen Blixen in Africa
Documentary • 90 min • 3 seasons, 689 episodes • ★ 7.2/10
Episode synopsis
Karen Blixen's voyage to Africa in 1913 was a journey away from the 20th century. Kenya was then a semi-feudal society, a land of Masai and Kikuyu, teeming with game. In 1931 she returned to Denmark having lost her farm, her health and her closest friends. Within a decade she had produced her three greatest books Seven Gothic Tales, Out of Africa and Last Tales. Karen Blixen had become Isak Dinesen, the writer. Taking part in tonight's portrait are her former servant Kamante, biographer Judith Thurman, Errol Trzebinski, Sir Laurens van der Post and Elspeth Huxley.
About Arena
Arena is a British television documentary series, made and broadcast by the BBC. Voted by leading TV executives in Broadcast as one of the top 50 most influential programmes of all time, it has run since 1 October 1975 with over five hundred episodes made, directed by the likes of Martin Scorsese, Alan Yentob, Roly Keating, Frederick Baker, Volker Schlondorff and Vikram Jayanti. Arena's subjects are a roll-call of the world's best known cultural figures from the 20th and 21st centuries, from singers Bob Dylan and Amy Winehouse to academics Edward Said and Eric Hobsbawm, from writers Jean Genet and V S Naipaul to artists Francis Bacon and Louise Bourgeois. The current series editor is Anthony Wall.