Follows dub poet master Linton Kwesi Johnson out of the recording studio onto the Brixton streets.
T. S. Eliot has been considered by many to be the leading American poet of this century. His contemporaries in the 1920s recognized in “The Waste Land” an expression of the exhaustion and fragmentation that afflicted so many in that post-war era. They also recognized the originality of Eliot’s poetic technique and admired his insistence on the need for spiritual values in an age of popular kitsch.
A short 1979 sand animation celebrating women's spirituality with 80-year-old lesbian poet Elsa Gidlow reading her work "What If."
Ponders the possibilities of what awaits us at the end of our life.
Michael Strunge and other young Danish poets, accompanied by images of night-time Copenhagen.
A documentary, originally produced for Dutch television, on the life and works of Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938), the groundbreaking Soviet poet and dissident.
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.
A short film inspired by the poetry of Billy Collins.
Yoshiro Ishihara (1915–1977), who burst upon the scene of Japanese modern poetry in the mid-1950s, is now remembered as a “poet of silence.” He said, “A poem is an impulse to resist writing.” This film is an attempt to seek out the landscape from his poem.
相思(上)
Five gay Black men who are HIV-positive discuss how they are battling the double stigmas surrounding their infection and homosexuality.
At underground film of the 1st Popular Festival of Catalan Poetry filmed in the Proce Theater in Barcelona on May 25, 1970, in solidarity with political prisoners. The participating poets were: Agustí Bartra, Joan Oliver (Pere IV), Salvador Espriu, Joan Brossa, Francesc Vallverdú and Gabriel Ferrater.
Lebanon today. The traces of the civil war are all too tangible as government corruption becomes unbearable. In a country where conflict and peace are caught in an endless cycle, musicians from different backgrounds pool their talents to create an underground music scene. Each evokes his or her representation of Lebanon: its shifting geographical, political, historical and social borders, its painful passage through conflict and instability. A touching portrait of a young generation trying to build an oasis in a hostile environment where the forces of destruction continue to wreak havoc.
A "cinematic object" by Mariano Llinás, divided into 9 chapters, based on the poetry of Henri Michaux.
Wingsuit BASE jumping is often presented as a thrill seeking adrenaline rush. Spellbound takes us deeper into the more contemplative aspects of jumping, as David Walden and friends venture into the mountains around his home in New Zealand. Beautiful scenery and hypnotic cinematography eject us from our daily lives into a world of air, earth and flight.
sucking on words is a documentary film that features interviews with, and extensive performances by, the American poet Kenneth Goldsmith. It also features critical commentary on his intense and ground-breaking conceptualist practice from three of North America’s leading voices on avant-garde poetics. Shot on location in New York in 2007, the lively conversations featured in sucking on words are an ideal introduction to Goldsmith’s witty and provocative works, which are already regarded as hallmarks of 21st-century literature. The film showcases readings from some of his notorious books: No.111 (found phrases ending in the ‘r’ rhyme and filtered alphabetically by syllable count); Soliloquy (a transcription of every word Goldsmith spoke for a week); Day (a retyping of one day’s New York Times newspaper); Traffic (one day’s worth of hourly radio traffic bulletins); and The Weather (one year’s worth of radio weather bulletins).
A kinetic typography animation set to a reading of the poem "The Wings" by Sebastian Fox.
A theatrical documentary about Hrytsko Chubai, a genius of Ukrainian poetry, a connoisseur of literature, art and music and the brightest representative of Lviv underground culture of late 60s early 70s.
This is the tale of a young woman, growing up in the age of the internet and turning the search for oneself into a public spectacle, allowing kids from all over the world to live their life through hers. Through her fragmented personalities you see the emergence of a new generation, in which the concept of a fixed identity has grown old.
Esse poema vai se chamar: A gente tem mania de só olhar pra frente