As queer trans and gender non-conforming children of the Vietnamese diaspora, we are fragmented at the crossroads of being displaced from not only a sense of belonging to our ancestral land, but also our own bodies which are conditioned by society to stray away from our most authentic existence.
Yet these bodies of ours are the vessels we sail to embark on a lifetime voyage of return to our original selves. It is our bodies that navigate the treacherous tides of normative systems that impose themselves on our very being. And it is our bodies that act as community lighthouses for collective liberation.
Ultimately, the landscape of our bodies is our blueprint to remembering, to healing, to blooming.
Only a handful of Yiddish poets remain alive. Chava Alberstein sets out to interview those last writers of Yiddish poetry, to hear their poems and stories. Along the way, she sings a collection of Yiddish folk songs.
"The Lady in the Book" is Sylvia Plath, a major author of 20th-century American poetry and a feminist icon following her sudden death at the age of thirty. This film offers a glimpse into her world and work, through encounters with women who live today in the places where she grew up.
Shows that poems can be written about many subjects. Points out that choral speaking and impromptu composition can increase the enjoyment of poems.
Twelve shots, four sequences. Each of them will try to evoke a feeling, a sensation, an idea, a landscape… just like the iconic and transcendental Japanese poems known as “Haiku”.
Performance and conversation with husband-and-wife poets Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon at a New Jersey festival, in their Wilmot (N.H.) hometown and their Eagle Pond farmhouse.
Using simple, illuminative paper-cut puppetry, this enchanting video imagines the moment of witness that inspired Gwendolyn Brooks to write her landmark poem, “We Real Cool.”
Smoky little clubs, late nights, late nights of conversation over a glass of beer and a guitar. The lyricist Géza Bereményi and the composer-performer Tamás Cseh are the creators of the most topical and accurate songs of the 70s and 80s, expressing the mood of the "30s and 40s" of that time - a mood that was their own destiny. This stunning recording from 1980 includes songs like Tangó, Álomfejtés, Szabó Kálmán tegnap este..., A 100. éjszaka, A legjobb viccek, Születtem Magyarországon, A dédapa dala, Egy bogár, Krakkói vonat, Az ócska cipő, Filmdal.
“Poussières de Juillet”, produced in 1967 by Hachemi El-Chérif, is taken from a poem by Kateb Yacine. "We made a film on the return of the ashes of Emir Abdelkader, to Algeria. It was the opportunity to make a film on the ancestors with M'hamed Issiakhem. He designed glass plates on the basis of my texts. Then we had actors collaborate. It was a film which cost us a total of 300 dinars, proof that we could do work for television without too much money. We won two first international prizes at the Belgrade festival. We left the original of the film with the Egyptians in Alexandria and they lost it. We kept a copy but over time I wonder what happened to it, because there is no not even had a screening, they say it still exists, but I don't know in what state." Kateb Yacine, July 28, 1986, interview with Arlette Casas.
Jean Sénac, born in Béni Saf in Algeria in 1926 and died in Algiers in 1973, is today considered one of the great French writers and poets and the only one of his reputation to have accompanied the Algerian revolution before November 1954. part of all the debates and got involved, very early and with immense enthusiasm, in a work of commitment which ended badly. His poetry, his sexual preferences and his political lyricism work against him: rejected as much by the Pieds Noirs as by the FLN activists then by the power in place in Algiers, Jean Sénac was assassinated in 1973 at his home in Algiers, in circumstances never clarified.
Various clips of jellyfish accompanied by the narration of two poems concerning a deity's lover.
Combining the authenticity of Indigenous writer Rebecca Thomas' narrative, the power of poetry, and stunning animation, "I Place You into the Fire" invites viewers to consider their roles in fostering understanding, compassion and justice.
Three short experimental video lyrics based on the classical figure.
A collaborative film created during Lockdown in response to the political landscape and the work of Daisaku Ikeda.
A series of in-depth conversations with Poet Laureate Rita Dove—conducted and recorded by Eduardo Montes-Bradley between September 2012, and October 2013. The film explores the poet's life, exposing fundamental facts of Dove's childhood and formative years growing up in Akron, Ohio in the 1950s and during the turbulent 1960s, supplemented by selections from hundreds of still images and several hours of home movies from the Dove family's collection.
A short film commissioned by CBC based on a poem by Canadian poet Irving Layton.
The work is a video-poem, an exploration and reflection on the sense of vision as a tool to understand signifiers - but also and more importantly, as means through which we can interpret something by feeling it on an intuitive level. stripped of their original context, and deprived of words or sounds, mixed-media imaginary is collaged in non-linear format of storytelling. By forming different constellations of images, meaning is left open.
