Cowboy Poets

Once described by the press as "one of the most controversial figures on the Australian art scene", avant-garde poet and playwright Christopher Barnett achieved a level of notoriety in the Melbourne underground theatre scene during the ‘70s and ‘80s, before self-exiling to France. He remains there today, running an experimental theatre lab working with the marginalised and underprivileged, applauded by the establishment (including former French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault) and faithful to his belief that art can change the world. These Heathen Dreams is an intimate portrait of Barnett's life and revolutionary philosophy. Combining archival footage dating back to the ‘60s with contemporary observational documentation and text from Barnett's writings, it is a poignant and inspiring study of the power of both art and political activism.

Fernanda Pivano: A Farewell to Beat

In the 1980s, writer, poet, radio personality and football enthusiast Franck Venaille is diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. He decides to travel the length of the Scheldt river, to dip his hands in its source, and brings back the long epic poem La Descente de l'Escaut. Today, the disease has progressed, but Venaille still spends much of his time working in the study where he wrote the text. Je me suis en marche is both a road movie weaving together the poem, Venaille now and during his journey, and a documentary adaptation of the epic odyssey of a sick man retracing a river across 450 kilometres.

Ján Smrek menej známy

A poetic short film showing a day in the 2019 protests in Santiago, Chile through documentary images.

The Kurdish Iraqi poet and actor Zeravan Khalil travels with his dog through an Alpine gorge after fleeing from IS war and genocide. As he remembers the abomination, he writes a poem with the title “You drive me mad” in Kurmanji Kurdish. In his home country, Yazidic Kurds are forbidden to work in his profession. Then he eats his apple and wanders through Europe’s middle with more hope.

Milan Rúfus

Documentary about the Venezuelan poet Armando Rojas Guardia.

The documentary is titled after Arkadaş Z. Özger’s poem “Hello My Dear” which had caused much controversy in the period it was first published. Considered to be in defiance of heteronormativity, the said poem includes references to the poet’s personality, his family, his relationship to the society, and his “unexpected” death, which came three years after its publication. Today, 50 years after it was written, the documentary follows these same lines in the poem utilising cinematic elements. The documentary also rediscovers the poetics; reaches out to the family, the comrades, the friendships, departing from the official historical accounts, cognizant of his experience of otherness, in pursuit of the “lost” portrait of Arkadaş Z. Özger.

Documentary about the poet Miguel Ramón Utrera.

A poem about mania written by Omar Zefier. His second film.

Lockdown, lack of green space, Don Quixote and video games.

Through performatic acts and some exposition, a group of poets of that 1980's generation make great use of words, poems and rebellious acts criticizing the then current generation and its lack of admiration for the poetic works that were being created.

TV documentary film about the life of New Zealand poet James K. Baxter.

Dragphoria is a short film about drag and identity, finding yourself in a noisy crowd, and slowly accepting yourself after a long-awaited denial.

A documentary, originally produced for Dutch television, on the life and works of Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938), the groundbreaking Soviet poet and dissident.

A rainy bus ride becomes a poetic reflection on memory, love, and the small details of urban life. Through imagined cinema, conversations, and drifting memories, two voices travel across a city suspended in nostalgia and time.

Documentary exploring Ted Hughes, one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, focusing on how his life story influenced his work and vision.

Movie A mash-up about contemporary oral poetry, that shows and dismantle the machine that builds the current Buenos Aires underground. A fundamental journey to understand the Argentine afterpop culture. the constitution of Buenos Aires under oral poetry.

Based on the idea that drugs have influenced some of our greatest minds (Poe, Baudelaire etc.), this film documents just how influential drug experiences have been on the minds of great writers, poets and thinkers.