Angel of the Night(1981)

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.

Ján Smrek menej známy(sk)

Poet of His People(en)

Pablo Neruda’s life unfolds and becomes the basis for the symbolic representation of his poem “Barcarola”, intermixing live action, still footage, computer images, dance and poetry.

Zurita, You Will See Not to See(es)

An account of the experiences by poet and National Literature Award laureate Raúl Zurita, during his travels and his daily life, as he reflects on topics such as state terrorism and death

A Choice(vi)

Refuse to compromise to choose freedom

Dans les yeux d'Elsa Triolet(fr)

Portrait of the writer Elsa Triolet, wife of poet Louis Aragon. The tile is a play on a famous poem by Louis Les yeux d'Elsa.

Spellbound(en)

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.

Lejano Interior(es)

A "cinematic object" by Mariano Llinás, divided into 9 chapters, based on the poetry of Henri Michaux.

Refugee Poetry(ku)

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.

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.

Copenhagen(en)

This Traveltalk series short visits Copenhagen.

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).

Francisco Massiani(es)

This documentary is a chronicle of the journey through the most important sites of the life of venezuelan writer Francisco Massiani who reveals the details of his work and the love of his life.

Do Útero Ao Túmulo(pt)

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.

Change Itself – An Art Apart: Genesis Breyer P-Orridge(en)

To sum up the life and work of British artist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge is close to impossible. Not only because of the wide range of artistic disciplines, but also because of the timespan, since the mid 1960s to the present day, that has been saturated by hundreds of records, thousands of concerts, exhibitions, interviews, videos, spoken word performances, collages, sculptures, philosophy, cultural engineering, occultism and radical transgender concepts. A couple of descriptions are still valid after these 50 years of active creativity and provocation. P-Orridge is a romantic existentialist and a cultural engineer. Everything is both work as such and seed for cultural and behavioural change.

Khamsin(fr)

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.

Walt Whitman(en)

This American Experience tells Whitman's life story, from his working-class childhood in Long Island, to his years as a newspaper reporter in Brooklyn when he struggled to support his impoverished family, then to his reckless pursuit of the attention and affection he craved for his work, to his death in 1892.

Wood Mountain Poems(en)

In this short documentary, Canadian poet Andrew Suknaski introduces us to Wood Mountain, the south central Saskatchewan village he calls home. In between musings on his poetry, which is tinged with nostalgia and the vast loneliness of the plains, the poet discusses the area’s multicultural background and Native heritage, as well as the customs and stories of these various ethnic groups.

Merton: A Film Biography(en)

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.