A biographical portrait of Albert Camus, the French-Algerian writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957 and died three years later in a car crash at forty-six. The film opens with a story from his childhood in colonial Algeria, tracing the poverty of his early years through his work as a journalist for the Resistance paper Combat and his emergence as the author of The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus, and The Plague. Interviews and archival material trace his uneasy relationship with the label "existentialist," his public break with Jean-Paul Sartre over politics and the Soviet Union, and his insistence on lucidity and revolt in the face of an absurd world rather than despair or ideology. The documentary treats his fiction and philosophy as inseparable from his biography, showing how the sun and poverty of Algeria, the war years in France, and his sudden fame after the Nobel Prize shaped a writer who kept describing himself as a stranger to his own success.