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.
Narrator (voice)
Self - Poet (archive footage)
Self
Self
Self
26 Mar 2000
A look at the theme of love in the life of the poet WH Auden, who wrote such famous poems as "Stop All the Clocks" (made famous in "Four Weddings and a Funeral"), "Lay Your Sleeping Head My Love" and "As I Walked Out One Evening". This film centres on new interviews with Auden’s close friends and looks at how his most important relationships were reflected in some of the greatest poems of the 20th century.
11 Feb 2025
Jo; or The Act of Riding a Bike is Zefier's third film.
21 Apr 1979
A career-spanning 1979 concert by Patti Smith and her band from Essen, Germany and broadcast on WDR's Rockpalast. Bonus interview after the concert.
01 Dec 2009
Eldar Ryazanov reads his poetry. An introspective movie on his multifaceted work.
27 Apr 2014
"Write Down, I am an Arab" tells the story of Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian national poet and one of the most influential writers of the Arab world. His writing shaped Palestinian identity and helped galvanize generations of Palestinians to their cause. Born in the Galilee, Darwish's family fled during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and returned a few years later to a ruined homeland. These early experiences would provide the foundation for a writing career that would come to define an entire nation.
13 Sep 2024
No overview found
14 Sep 2000
A fragmented biography, inconclusive, partial, of the brilliant Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, based on different testimonies: his links with Leonor de Acedevo —his mother— and María Kodama —his second wife—; his vast culture and devout dedication to literature, his and that of others; his country: the politicians and the disloyal military. Borges gradually builds his own impersonation of Borges.
09 Mar 1998
In this portrait film, we meet Inger Christensen in her apartment in Østerbro, Copenhagen, where she tells of her life and work, and reads excerpts from her major works.
08 Feb 2005
Award winning documentary by Joslyn Rose Lyons exploring the relationship between spiritual connection and the creative process in hip-hop music.
01 Jan 1983
This remarkable compilation follows an exchange of video letters that took place between Shuji Terayama and Shuntaro Tanikawa in the months immediately preceding Terayama's death. It can be thought of as a home video produced by two preeminent poets and inter-laid with highly abstract philosophizing, slightly aberrant behavior and occasionally flamboyant visuals.
10 Oct 2015
A Thousand Years of Joy charts poet/activist Robert Bly's journey from Midwestern farm boy to global troubadour, bestselling author of Iron John and leader of the men's movement.
19 Dec 2007
From July 21 through September 10th, 2007, the Museum for Contemporary Art Tokyo held an exhibition honouring Kazuo Oga, the art director and background artist for many famed works from Japan's Studio Ghibli. Over 600 works from the artist were on display, and numerous fans flocked to the one-of-a-kind exhibition celebrating the lush, gorgeous background artwork typifying many a work from Hayao Miyazaki and other Ghibli filmmakers. International fans of Oga and Studio Ghibli have not been left out, however. A Ghibli Artisan - Kazuo Oga Exhibition - The One Who Drew Totoro's Forest allows fans the opportunity to attend the exhibition, as well as watch interviews and testimonials with Oga's contemporaries and collaborators, all subtitled in English.
23 Aug 2018
Blanca Luz Brum traveled an unusual path, through twentieth-century Latin America, actively participating in the intellectual, political and artistic movements of Uruguay, Chile, Argentina, Peru and Mexico. It is today a symbol of female emancipation in Latin America. The versions about her life are varied and dissimilar, the testimonies of those who knew her, full of contradictions.
23 Feb 1993
Based on the idea that drugs have influenced some of our greatest minds (Poe, Baudelaire etc.), this film documents just how influential drug experiences have been on the minds of great writers, poets and thinkers.
27 Dec 2021
Dante Alighieri was a poet, philosopher and politician in 1300 Florence. The visionary author of "Inferno", the first book of the "Divine Comedy", he was both a direct witness and a narrator of his times and his poem is a remarkable geopolitical chronicle of a tumultuous period of the Middle Ages from 1300 to 1320, a time when Kings, Popes, rulers and warlords played a deadly chess game for the control of Europe. In this high end docudrama, some of the world's finest scholars will help provide historical context to the unfolding of events, making them accessible to a wide audience, and giving us a privileged viewpoint over one of the most eventful and funding chapters of European history.
01 Apr 2007
Documentary about Charles Olson, exploring his life and the significance of Gloucester, Massachusetts.
01 Oct 1970
Filmed on the rooftops of lower Manhattan, this performance film features the original Last Poets performing 28 numbers adapted from their legendary Concept-East Poetry appearance at New York's Paperback Theater in 1969. Described as “a conspiracy of ritual, street theater, soul music and cinema."
16 Feb 2024
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.
11 Jan 1976
A documentary, originally produced for Dutch television, on the life and works of Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938), the groundbreaking Soviet poet and dissident.
08 Mar 1983
No overview found