Erich Fried fled Austria when the Nazis invaded in 1938 and destroyed his family, and went on to become their most famous living poet while residing in North London. Fried now returns to the Vienna of his childhood and visits East and West Berlin, while Observer correspondent Neal Ascherson assesses the relevance of his poetry to what Fried sees as the never-ending battle against the re-emergence of fascism.

Faced with arrest along with other filmmakers following the 1973 military coup that ended Salvador Allende's Marxist government in Chile, Raoul Ruiz fled. He settled in Paris and embraces his exile, but his strange and beautiful films suggest he is a joker of the most serious kind.