Intimate portrait of poet, playwright, painter and filmmaker Derek Walcott, set in his beloved native island, St Lucia.
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Cacaso, a Brazilian poet, lived in Rio de Janeiro. Born Antonio Carlos de Brito (1944-1987) he was one of the leaders of the marginal poetry movement. Cacaso filled notebooks not only with poems but reflections, drawings and collages. He also became a lyricist and partner of celebrated songwriters such as Tom Jobim, Edu Lobo, Toninho Horta, João Donato and Sivuca.
Five gay Black men who are HIV-positive discuss how they are battling the double stigmas surrounding their infection and homosexuality.
A biography of the poet W. B. Yeats and his contribution to the Irish independence movement as a Protestant nationalist.
A poem about mania written by Omar Zefier. His second film.
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.
Poetic stroll in the work of Jean Genet.
It's a sensitive, moving doc chronicling the life of Tétrault's brother Philip , a Montreal poet, musician and diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. A promising athlete as a child, Philip began experiencing mood swings in his early 20s. His extended family, including his daughter, share their conflicted feelings love, guilt, shame, anger with the camera. They want to make sure he's safe, but how much can they take?
Using the author's personal estate, current images of places where she lived or were dear to her, and archival images of television and film; using parts of her prose and poetry always with first-person testimonies; from Porto to Lisbon, from Granja to Lagos, from the Atlantic Sea to the Mediterranean, from Greece to 25 April: the passions and disappointments of a life and work dedicated to the search for the real, freedom and justice.
This documentary highlights the evolution of Brazil's Circo Voador venue from homespun artists' performance space to national cultural institution.
Smoky little clubs, late nights, late nights of conversation over a glass of beer and a guitar. The lyricist Géza Bereményi and the composer-performer Tamás Cseh are the creators of the most topical and accurate songs of the 70s and 80s, expressing the mood of the "30s and 40s" of that time - a mood that was their own destiny. This stunning recording from 1980 includes songs like Tangó, Álomfejtés, Szabó Kálmán tegnap este..., A 100. éjszaka, A legjobb viccek, Születtem Magyarországon, A dédapa dala, Egy bogár, Krakkói vonat, Az ócska cipő, Filmdal.
Sir John Betjeman visits and explains the architecture of various churches in the Diocese of Norwich. Among those visited: Sandringham church on the Queen's private estate, the Holy House of Our Lady of Walsingham and Norwich Cathedral.
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.
In 2002, Ju Anqi made a film about a tour by the poet Shu through Xinjiang, the most western-lying, autonomous Uyghur province of China. All that we know about Shu is that he plays a poet who sends himself on a business trip - an absurd, satirical starting point that sets the tone for the film. For a variety of reasons, it was not until 2013 that Ju started editing the rough, lyrical material that he had shot in what is now a very restless Xinjiang: it's like an excellent wine that has had time to mature. Structured around 16 poems which he wrote on the road, Shu’s physically exhausting journey takes him along endless rocky roads, passing shabby inns and through impressive landscapes from one prostitute to the next. In its documentary authenticity, Poet on a Business Trip is also an historic document that exudes an atmosphere of loss, providing an unsentimental yet melancholy glimpse of a country in transition and a mirror for the existential irreversibility of time. (c) iffr.com
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.
About Jösta Hagelbäck (1945-2009), Swedish film director, writer, poet, musician, actor etc. A human bipolar mixture of genius and madman. Invited to Hollywood, had an artistic hit with the film "Kejsaren/The Emperor" (1979) at the Berlin Film Festival.
