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Summary
"The upstart Bowery Slam Poetry Team, made up of five young African-American, Afro-Hispanic and queer poets, prepares for the national championships. Mentored by a demanding coach who pushes them past their personal boundaries to write from a painfully honest place, the poets break down, break through, and compose their best work ever. Will their soul-searching pieces about police violence and the whitewashing of Black culture be able to compete against...
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Called the "Woodstock of Poetry" by American Film, and "Dazzling" by the Los Angeles Times, Poetry in Motion is an unprecedented anthology of twenty-four leading North American poets who sing, chant, anything but "read" their work. The result is a celebration of poetry's ancient oral tradition. And an energetic demonstration that verse is alive and thriving in the media-blitzed age.
Summary
Brendan Behan's life can be divided into 3 parts: his youthful years in an English jail for his activities on behalf of the I.R.A.; his writing, drawn largely from his experiences as a prisoner; and his prodigious boozing, which resulted in his death in 1963 at the age of 41.
Allan Miller's affecting documentary tells Behan's story through the people who knew him best - his wife, brothers, I.R.A. comrades and fellow drinkers in the Dublin pubs,
...Summary
Ralph Fiennes’s exquisite performance of T. S. Eliot's poetic masterpiece is dynamically translated from stage to screen by director Sophie Fiennes. During the early days of COVID, the Oscar® nominee set himself the challenge of committing FOUR QUARTETS to memory, and in 2021 he brought it to the London stage followed by a tour of theaters across the UK. Written by Nobel Prize winner Eliot in the shadow of the Second World War, the poem is a searching...
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An in-depth look at the relationship between the late musician Leonard Cohen and his Norwegian muse Marianne Ihlen. Official Selection at the **Sundance Film Festival**. *"Nick Broomfield's riveting documentary gives us a vivid snapshot of the early 1960s and a complicated, mysterious love story." - Peter Bradshaw, **Guardian***
7) To Be Heard
Summary
Three Bronx teens search for their voices and an answer to the question: Can language change lives? Karina, Pearl, and Anthony are precariously balanced on the edge. Inspired by three teachers in a radical poetry workshop, can they write their own life stories, imagining a future where fathers aren't in jail, mothers aren't abusive and college is a place where you awake every morning instead of just dreaming about it every night? A dedicated filmmaking...
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When asked a question on politics, late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish once answered: “I write about love to expose the conditions that don’t allow me to write about love.” In TWO TRAVELERS TO A RIVER Palestinian actress Manal Khader recites such a poem by Mahmoud Darwish: a concise reflection on how things could have been.
9) Dante
Summary
Most notable for his vast poem, The Divine Comedy, Dante's work continues to resonate with audiences today. Filmmaker Malcolm Hossick uncovers the Italian poet's background and his influential work from the Renaissance period.
10) Rudyard Kipling
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The life of the famed 19th and 20th-century British writer who spent his early years in India before returning to England in 1889.
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This documentary explores the artistic connection between Robert Motherwell’s Open Series and Rafael Alberti’s poetry cycle, A La Pintura. Infatuated with Alberti’s text, Motherwood uses his words as the subject for his first venture into aquatints at Tatyana Grosman’s printmaking workshop. Historic footage shows Alberti, the last member of the Garcia Lorca generation, reading his poetry aloud. His poetic themes voice an homage to painting,...
Summary
THE CANCER JOURNALS REVISITED is prompted by the question of what it means to re-visit and re-vision Black lesbian feminist poet Audre Lorde’s classic 1980 memoir of her breast cancer experience today. At the invitation of filmmaker Lana Lin, who was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2010, twenty-seven writers, artists, activists, health care advocates, and current and former patients recite Lorde’s manifesto aloud on camera, collectively dramatizing...
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Winner of the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1963. One of the 20th century's finest poets, Robert Frost, was nearing the end of his life when WGBH asked Shirley Clarke to film a documentary about him. The two rebels got along famously – other had grown up in cities but had a love for nature. Frost's poems were often direct and economic depictions of rural life cloaked in the colloquialisms of his beloved New England. Using intricately...
16) Planet of Snail
Summary
An acclaimed documentary following the journey of a most extraordinary couple. Young-Chan is an accomplished poet who can no longer hear or see. He communicates with his wife Soon-Ho through finger braille, a unique form of communication where words are tapped on each other's hands. Combining breathtaking imagery with Young-Chan's personal writings, PLANET OF SNAIL becomes a transfixing portrait of life on what seems like another planet, where touch...
17) Osceola Mays
Summary
The setting is simple, but the stories, songs, and poems of Osceola Mays are remarkable indeed. In them, the past is recounted with a reverent intensity that expresses the deeply felt emotions of three generations of black Texans. The harsh realities of segregation and discrimination are juxtaposed with the importance of family and community life in these spirituals and poems learned by Osceola Mays from her mother, Azalene Douglas, and her grandmother,...
Summary
What does it take to carve out a career as a poet? Why on earth would anyone attempt it? AL PURDY WAS HERE is the portrait of an artist driven to become a great Canadian poet at a time when the category barely existed. Al Purdy is a charismatic tower of contradictions: a "sensitive man" who whips out a poem in a bar fight; a factory worker who finds grace in an Arctic flower; a mentor to young writers who remained a stranger to sons. Purdy has been...
Summary
When the brilliant writing and troubled life of Californian Larry Levis came to an abrupt halt at age 49, his death posed a question: is self-destruction required for a life fully committed to art? Featuring an original score by Iron and Wine, this innovative documentary searches his childhood working alongside Mexican-American field hands, three marriages, friendships with America’s greatest poets, and his own words for answers. The film had its...
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"My most austere work, but also the closest to my heart." So Derek Jarman described THE ANGELIC CONVERSATION, his lyrical celebration of gay love set within the context of a series of Shakespeare's sonnets. Ethereal Super-8 images slowed to a magical, meditative pace follow the love affair between two men, as Dame Judi Dench provides a soothing presence with her narration of fourteen sonnets. The disruption of the narrative with images of barren and...
