The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg

Visionary, radical, spiritual seeker, renowned poet, founding member of a major literary movement, champion of human rights, Buddhist, political activist and teacher. Extensive archival footage, interviews, and home movies cover Allen Ginsberg's life, activism, and influence on American culture through the Beat era, the 1960s, and beyond.

Beat Angel

Jack Kerouac returns to earth as an angel with the goal of changing the life of a struggling writer.

Black Lodge

Set in a nightmarish Bardo, a place between death and rebirth, a tormented writer faces down demons of his own making. Forced to confront the darkest moment in his life, he mines fractured and repressed memories for a way out. A woman is at the center of all the writer’s afterlife encounters. She is the subject of his life’s greatest regret, and she materializes everywhere in this Otherworld. The writer cannot detach any thoughts of his life from her.

Howl

Howl is an homage to the reading rituals of the Beat poets, to Wholly Communion, to 1965, to Allen Ginsberg, to Jack Kerouac, to William Burroughs, to all those books that we believe to be published in heaven, and to all the restless spirits, from these lands. The film documents the translator of the poem Howl into Turkish, accompanied by a musician.

Chicago 10

Archival footage, animation and music are used to look back at the eight anti-war protesters who were put on trial following the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

Pull My Daisy

Based on an incident in the life of Beat icon Neal Cassady and his wife, the painter Carolyn, the film tells the story of a railway brakeman whose wife invites a respected bishop over for dinner. However, the brakeman's Bohemian friends crash the party, with comic results. Pull My Daisy is a film that typifies the Beat Generation. Directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, Daisy was adapted by Jack Kerouac from the third act of his play, Beat Generation; Kerouac also provided improvised narration.

Sing! Fight! Sing! Fight! From LeRoi to Amiri

The story of how Everett Leroy Jones became Amiri Baraka, from his childhood to the mid '60s, is told through interviews recorded in the late '90s.

William S. Burroughs Birthday Bash

To celebrate the 100th birthday of America's most audacious writer, William S. Burroughs, Chicago Humanities Festival brings together a motley crew of poets, writers, and musicians. William Seward Burroughs (1914 - 1997) was an American writer and visual artist. He was a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author whose influence is considered to have affected a range of popular culture as well as literature. Burroughs's needs took him across the United States, down into Mexico, to Europe and beyond. On his travels, he meets up with various members of the underground drug and "outcast" cultures.

The Honey Bee

Beat poem parable to black youth.

A Closer Shave

Private View Episode Three. Self care and razor blades.

Tinta Film

Big Sur

Big Sur is a film adaptation of the Jack Kerouac autobiographical novel of the same name.

A Line a Day Must Be Enough!

In a film bursting with lyrics, pictures, and music the director shows us a way into the peculiar universe of Tóroddur, and the otherwise not very talkative artist gives us a glimpse of his thoughts on art, God, life and death.

Living on the Edge: The Poetic Works of Gérald Leblanc

A child of the Beat Generation, Gérald Leblanc conjoined urban-ness and American-ness, wandering and belonging, far beyond the boundaries of taboo. In so doing, he helped propel Acadia into the modern era.

Odd Børretzen: Mer enn helt all right

A portrait of Norwegian poet Odd Børretzen in his own words, featuring musical highlights from Børretzen's work with musicians Alf Cranner and Lars Martin Myhre.

The Subterraneans

A disillusioned writer explores the subterranean depths of San Francisco's North Beach district.

Newness

In contemporary Los Angeles, two millennials navigating a social media–driven hookup culture begin a relationship that pushes both emotional and physical boundaries.

All of You

Laura and Simon have been best friends since college. Over the years, they've realized their bond is more than platonic. Can they—and should they—risk everything to explore a love that has existed all along?

Love Jones

Darius Lovehall is a young black poet in Chicago who starts dating Nina Moseley, a beautiful and talented photographer. While trying to figure out if they've got a "love thing" or are just "kicking it," they hang out with their friends, talking about love and sex. Then Nina tests the strength of Darius' feelings and sets a chain of romantic complications into motion.

Adult World

Amy, a naive college graduate who believes she's destined to be a great poet, begrudgingly accepts a job at a sex shop while she pursues a mentorship with reclusive writer Rat Billings.

Naked Lunch

Blank-faced bug killer Bill Lee and his dead-eyed wife, Joan, like to get high on Bill's pest poisons while lounging with Beat poet pals. After meeting the devilish Dr. Benway, Bill gets a drug made from a centipede. Upon indulging, he accidentally kills Joan, takes orders from his typewriter-turned-cockroach, ends up in a constantly mutating Mediterranean city and learns that his hip friends have published his work -- which he doesn't remember writing.

Kill Your Darlings

A murder in 1944 draws together the great poets of the beat generation: Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs.

Mo' Better Blues

Talented but self-centered trumpeter Bleek Gilliam is obsessed with his music and indecisiveness about his girlfriends Indigo and Clarke. But when he is forced to come to the aid of his manager and childhood friend, Bleek finds his world more fragile than he ever imagined.

The Unforgivable

A woman is released from prison after serving a sentence for a violent crime and re-enters a society that refuses to forgive her past.

World's Greatest Dad

In the wake of a freak accident, Lance suffers the worst tragedy and the greatest opportunity of his life. He is suddenly faced with the possibility of fame, fortune and popularity, if he can only live with the knowledge of how he got there.

Beat Street

An aspiring DJ, from the South Bronx, and his best friend, a promoter, try to get into show business by exposing people to hip-hop music and culture.

Fire with Fire

A tough, street-smart kid serving a sentence in a state youth reformatory meets a beautiful, innocent girl studying at a nearby convent. When forbidden love blossoms between them, they must fight the prison authorities, their parents and the law.

Fifty Shades Darker

When a wounded Christian Grey tries to entice a cautious Ana Steele back into his life, she demands a new arrangement before she will give him another chance. As the two begin to build trust and find stability, shadowy figures from Christian’s past start to circle the couple, determined to destroy their hopes for a future together.

Players

New York sportswriter Mack has spent years devising successful hook-up "plays" with her friends, but when she unexpectedly falls for one of her targets, she must learn what it takes to go from simply scoring to playing for keeps.

The First Time

A spark of attraction smolders, then ignites, between two teens from different high schools who meet by chance at a party.

For Colored Girls

A film about existence from the perspective of 20 nameless black females. Each of the women portray one of the characters represented in the collection of twenty poems, revealing different issues that impact women in general and women of color in particular.

Touched with Fire

Two young poets with bipolar disorder begin a highly passionate, volatile relationship that threatens both their futures.

Spring

A young man in a personal tailspin flees the US to Italy, where he sparks up a romance with a woman harboring a dark, primordial secret.

Father of the Bride

Proud father Stanley Banks remembers the day his daughter, Kay, got married. Starting when she announces her engagement through to the wedding itself, we learn of all the surprises and disasters along the way.

The Edge of Love

When the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas and his flirtatious wife Caitlin sweep into war-torn London, the last thing they expect is to bump into Dylan's childhood sweetheart Vera. Despite her joy at seeing Dylan after so many years, Vera is swept off her feet by a dashing officer, William Killick, and finds herself torn between the open adoration of her new found beau and the wily charms of the exotic Welshman.

Looking for Richard

Al Pacino's deeply-felt rumination on Shakespeare's significance and relevance to the modern world through interviews and an in-depth analysis of "Richard III."