Inspired by the poetry of Robert Frost, this short primarily aims to capture the dynamic nature of the world around us; the ego and the id; the past and the present; everything that has, as of yet, diluted the course of life as we know it.
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?
Once described by the press as "one of the most controversial figures on the Australian art scene", avant-garde poet and playwright Christopher Barnett achieved a level of notoriety in the Melbourne underground theatre scene during the ‘70s and ‘80s, before self-exiling to France. He remains there today, running an experimental theatre lab working with the marginalised and underprivileged, applauded by the establishment (including former French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault) and faithful to his belief that art can change the world. These Heathen Dreams is an intimate portrait of Barnett's life and revolutionary philosophy. Combining archival footage dating back to the ‘60s with contemporary observational documentation and text from Barnett's writings, it is a poignant and inspiring study of the power of both art and political activism.
An event organised by CND pits the bomb against poetry. Hear artists who hoped that words and rhymes could put an end to destructive times.
Poet John Betjeman is shown visiting locations including Vauxhall Park, Aldersgate Street station, Camden Town and Hatfield, where he recites a handful of his poems.
This documentary highlights the evolution of Brazil's Circo Voador venue from homespun artists' performance space to national cultural institution.
During the pandemic, Dave McKenzie came upon an object in his studio, located in the basement of his house, that he had bought some time ago. Its purpose was to collect sawdust, although he had never used it. He began trying to fit himself into it, eventually creating and recording loosely improvised movement studies with this object—an accessory to a table saw—and others, including a pane of glass and a piece of Ikea furniture. He has explained, “I was thinking about writing and performing, and why in the year 2020 I felt the need to make a box that I could stick my head into and cry.” In his art, McKenzie is more interested in asking questions than in providing answers. As he has put it: “I am always decidedly asking ‘Why this?’ Lately I am equally interested in asking ‘Why not?’ and moving without having come up with any answer.”
A film about the Swiss Italian poet Fabio Pusterla and his creative poetic process, his struggle to find an honest language, one which adheres to the personal experience and is able to unfold a hidden truth that creates a strong and profound bond with the other, with his public.
Jump Cut Jukebox is a highly stylized semi-fictional fly-on-the-wall documentary which was cobbled together from random bits of footage collected over a span of 10 months.
Iggy Pop reads and recites Michel Houellebecq’s manifesto. The documentary features real people from Houellebecq’s life with the text based on their life stories.
Inside a computer a space-time is revealed in which image and sound become numbers and motion manifests as rhythm, flow and chaos. This tracking and integration experiment removes the superficial identity of video to detect kinetic disturbances in everyday environment.
A young filmmaker struggles with her mental illness as she makes a documentary with the author Fiona Wright, and challenges her to express her experience with anorexia by preforming of one of her poems.
James Franco interviews three experts on the poet Hart Crane, whose life was the subject of his feature The Broken Tower (2011).
Is it possible to travel twice to the same memory? The filmmaker built a cabin on an isolated riverbank, just opposite his childhood island, which had disappeared under the water after the construction of a dam. The goal was to go back to that place, which had become invisible. Only the trees of the island where he’d played stood firm in the middle of the water, like the masts of a broken toy boat, so the air was the only space left, the only vestige of the past to be conquered. This film is a diary of a castaway in memories: four months of a Walden experience in a lost paradise with two hens, a small vegetable garden and a clock that stopped forever at 11.36 and 23 seconds.
When Robert Lax was approached in the early 1980s about doing a video documentary on him, he had only one condition—that it be focused on his creative work and not a biography of his personal life. “Let’s keep it simple and about the work, with maybe some comments on it. No baby pictures PLEASE!” This documentary is an attempt at an introduction to the important works of poet Robert Lax.
An educational film about power sources that’s rendered as a lyrical meditation on heat and vapor, The Four Elements is a poetic and avant-garde documentary Curtis Harrington made for the United States Information Agency.
Follows the young people of Selma, Alabama's RATCo (Random Acts of Theatre Company) as they journey to New York City to share their story of hope, resilience, and overcoming.