Waiting for Beckett

In his lifetime, Thomas Merton was hailed as a prophet and censured for his outspoken social criticism. For nearly 27 years he was a monk of the austere Trappist order, where he became an eloquent spiritual writer and mystic as well as an anti-war advocate and witness to peace. Merton: A Film Biography provides the first comprehensive look at this remarkable 20th century religious philosopher who wrote, in addition to his immensely popular autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain, over 60 books on some of the most pressing social issues of our time, some of which are excerpted here. Merton offers an engaging profile of a man whose presence in the world touched millions of people and whose words and thoughts continue to have a profound impact and relevance today.

Documentary tracing the extreme life of outlaw writer, performance artist and punk icon, Kathy Acker. Through animation, archival footage, interviews and dramatic reenactments, director Barbara Caspar explores Acker's colorful history, from her well-heeled upbringing to her role as the scribe of society's fringe.

He is considered the greatest European poet of the Middle Ages and his work unfolds the whole panopticon of occidental education – theology, philosophy, sciences, politics and literature. But who has really read it, the “Divine Comedy”? Who knows more of its creator Dante Alighieri than that he had an eagle-like profile and was in love with a woman named Beatrice? 700 years after Dante’s death, the filmmaker Adolfo Conti travels through Italy with Dante’s words in mind and eyes to see the world as Dante did. As the film encounters the beauty of arts and the Tuscan landscape, the forces of nature, a dramatic life story is unfolded.

Documentary about the staging of 'Waiting for Godot' in prison.

A chronicle of legendary Native American poet/activist John Trudell's travels, spoken word performances, and politics.

A documentary about Néstor Perlongher. His life, his poems, and his activism in Argentina's Frente de Liberación Homosexual (homosexual liberation front).

Poet, singer / songwriter and ladies man Leonard Cohen is interviewed in his home about his life and times. The interview is interspersed with archive photos and exuberant praise and live perfomances from an eclectic mix of musicians, including: Jarvis Cocker, Rufus & Martha Wainwright, Teddy Thompson, ANOHNI, The Handsome Family and U2's Bono and The Edge.

Marcel Proust's "In Search of Lost Time" is one of the great novels of world literature. The documentary immerses itself in the very own cosmos, spanning 3,000 pages and hundreds of characters, for which Proust's own world was the source of inspiration, and brings Proust's moral portrait of the Belle Epoque to new life.

In 1244, Jelaluddin Rumi, a Sufi scholar in Konya, Turkey, met an itinerant dervish, Shams of Tabriz. A powerful friendship ensued. When Shams died, the grieving Rumi gripped a pole in his garden, and turning round it, began reciting imagistic poetry about inner life and love of God. After Rumi's death, his son founded the Mevlevi Sufi order, the whirling dervishes. Lovers of Rumi's poems comment on their power and meaning, including religious historian Huston Smith, writer Simone Fattal, poet Robery Bly, and Coleman Barks, who reworks literal translations of Rumi into poetic English. Musicians accompany Barks and Bly as they recite their versions of several of Rumi's ecstatic poems.

The creative chemistry of four brilliant artists —drummer John Densmore, guitarist Robby Kreiger, keyboardist Ray Manzarek and singer Jim Morrison— made The Doors one of America's most iconic and influential rock bands. Using footage shot between their formation in 1965 and Morrison's death in 1971, it follows the band from the corridors of UCLA's film school, where Manzarek and Morrison met, to the stages of sold-out arenas.

Stéphane Mallarmé is one of the many educational documentaries that Éric Rohmer did for the television during the 1960’s. At the beginning of the film, Rohmer states that he has placed in Mallarmé’s mouth words taken from an interview with the writer by Jules Heuret published in 1891.

A dramatised documentary about the life of Rumi, a Persian mystical poet whose images of universal love and divine mystery continue to be celebrated more than 700 years after his death.

The film focuses on the exciting life journey of Swiss writer Katharina Zimmermann. She follows her husband on a mission to the jungle in Indonesia where she raises their four children and five foster children and lives through the military coup. Back in Switzerland Katharina discovers her voice and finds her path. Now, at eighty, she is writing her life story. Yet suddenly she faces another battle because her publisher is threatening to let her go.

Documentary about the life and work of Flemish poet Karel Jonckheere looked at from four perspectives/professions: farmer, fisherman, sheepherder and hunter.

Sir Ian McKellen reads the poetry, Michael Wood traces the journey on the ground. Together they conjure up the extraordinary life, times and words of China’s greatest poet, Du Fu. In this film, the first to ever be made about Du Fu in the west, Michael follows his tracks by road, train and riverboat. Along the way, he meets ordinary people, dancers and musicians, who help to tell the amazing story of a poet whose words have resonated through the centuries, describing the experiences of ordinary people caught up in war, corruption, famine and natural disasters. "I am one of the privileged. If my life is so bitter, then how much worse is the life of the common people?"

The first episode in a series of “adaptations” of poet Bernadette Mayer’s book Utopia that artist Beatrice Gibson envisions to undertake over the next decade, producing a series of small, quotidian films that together, and over time, will constitute an epic. This first film is drawn from Chapter 4, entitled “The Arrangement: of Houses & Buildings, Birth, Death, Money, Schools, Dentists, Birth Control, Work, Air, Remedies, and So on” and was shot at home during the pandemic.

Dante Alighieri was a poet, philosopher and politician in 1300 Florence. The visionary author of "Inferno", the first book of the "Divine Comedy", he was both a direct witness and a narrator of his times and his poem is a remarkable geopolitical chronicle of a tumultuous period of the Middle Ages from 1300 to 1320, a time when Kings, Popes, rulers and warlords played a deadly chess game for the control of Europe. In this high end docudrama, some of the world's finest scholars will help provide historical context to the unfolding of events, making them accessible to a wide audience, and giving us a privileged viewpoint over one of the most eventful and funding chapters of European history.

Writers, publishers, fans, and friends share their perspectives and memories of sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick. In his career, Philip Kindred Dick (1928–82) published dozens of science fiction novels and short stories. His work has reached a wider audience due to such film adaptations as BLADE RUNNER (1982), TOTAL RECALL (1990), MINORITY REPORT (2002), and A SCANNER DARKLY (2006).

The last day of Patrizia Cavalli’s home. Before it’s all gone.

The Spanish author Enrique Jardiel Poncela (1901-1952) was one of the best comedy writers of all time, a novelist and newspaper columnist, misunderstood, even censored, both by the Second Republic government and Francoism, an outsider ahead of his time; also a filmmaker and screenwriter in Hollywood, architect of a revolutionary theatrical building and scenographer, cartoonist and illustrator. An implausible genius.