Living on the Edge: The Poetic Works of Gérald Leblanc(2005)

She(en)

She is a full-length documentary about writer Aimée Baker and her award-winning poetry collection Doe. Doe is her quest to give voice to the missing and unidentified women of the United States.

Hell Frozen Over(en)

Bernadette Corporation describes this work as "A fashion film about the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé and the color white." Produced for the 2000 Walker Art Center exhibition Let's Entertain, this short film employs a range of strategies to approach the idea of nothingness, emptiness, and vacuity, with an eye to how these notions relate to contemporary mass-cultural entertainment. Juxtaposing "documentary" takes on a fashion shoot with footage of semiologist Sylvère Lotringer giving an impromptu lecture on Mallarmé on a frozen lake, Hell Frozen Over maintains an ambiguous stance from which to both critique and celebrate the power of surface.

An Investigation on the Night That Won't Forget(tl)

Erwin Romulo, the late Alexis Tioseco’s best friend, recalls the events after the critic and his girlfriend Nika Bohinc’s untimely death in their home in Quezon City. Diaz makes use of one long take to allow Romulo an uninterrupted narration of the events. The pain of recalling is palpable.

Batouk(fr)

This uneven and uninspired documentary of Africa is a collection from various stock footage. Female dancers in mod clothes dance on the Eiffel Tower in comparison to the primitive dances of native Africans. A lone runner trains for a marathon, and a few animals are shown in their natural habitat. Commentary and modern jazz and pop music help to make this seem much longer than 66 minutes.

Julia, toda en mí(es)

A poetic journey about the life and work of Puerto Rican poet Julia de Burgos.

Dread Beat an' Blood(en)

Follows dub poet master Linton Kwesi Johnson out of the recording studio onto the Brixton streets.

Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) - Muse of Keening(en)

A short film by Barry Lowe and Dino Mahoney, starring Pauline Burton as Anna. The film is an introduction to the great Soviet era modernist poet, Anna Akhmatova; shot in winter in Saint Petersburg (Leningrad), it contains rare interviews with people who knew her, academics, and dramatized readings of some of her poems.

Dublin, Spoken.(en)

Three spoken word poets and event organizers based in Dublin - Melissa Ridge, Hazel Hogan and Kasey Shelley - reveal the positive impact poetry has had on their lives, and the challenges they have turning their hobby into a career.

Angel of the Night(da)

Michael Strunge and other young Danish poets, accompanied by images of night-time Copenhagen.

Though You May Not Know(es)

An account of the life and work of the Spanish poet Luis García Montero; a journey through his experiences, his mentors, his influences and his contact with other artists, both from the literary world and from other disciplines.

Una pasión llamada Clara Lair(es)

Through dramatization and interviews with her colleagues, this film captures the life and work of famed Puerto Rican poet Mercedes Negrón Muñoz (also known as Clara Lair).

Wordsworth Country(en)

A look at the Lake District and its famous poet.

Milan Rúfus(sk)

Voices & Visions: T.S. Eliot(en)

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.

The Centuries Surround Me with Fire(en)

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

sucking on words(en)

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).

Ján Smrek menej známy(sk)

Searching Eva(de)

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.

Little Mad Robinson(sk)

The film is an unusual portrait of Slovak poet Jozef Urban who tragically died. Nevertheless, his short life was enough for his work to influence social and cultural spheres in Slovakia. First of all, however, he was a bohemian and a rebel able to see beyond his generation’s field of vision. He lived a life of an impalpable hothead floundering in loves, desires and passions. At the same time, as an author, his reasoning and views were precious and clear.

Bert Schierbeek/The Door(nl)

A short portrait of poet Bert Schierbeek, who reads from his poetry.