Film Categories: Poetry

  • Traje de Luces | Suit of Lights

    Traje de Luces | Suit of Lights is an expressive documentary composed with footage of a Spanish bullfight, that iconic imagery of highly decorated masculinity and violence masked as nationalism. The footage was drawn from Jacques Madvo Collection material filmed in Spain between 1976-1978. Madvo shot this footage at a time when Spain began its difficult and flawed transition to democracy in the years following dictator Francisco Franco’s death in 1975. The film consists of 16mm footage that has been decayed in soil, contact-printed and laboriously re-photographed and these abstractions of light and darkness ground the inquiry surrounding why citizens…

  • Soy un ser cuyas raíces // I am a being whose roots

    Soy un ser cuyas raíces // I am a being whose roots reworks Jacques Madvo’s Countries & People: Venezuela to explore labour and migration. Taking the final words of the film’s voice-over as a starting point, Soy un ser cuyas raíces // I am a being whose roots pairs Madvo’s film footage with a text-based conversation with young Venezuelan literature scholar and language teacher Angel Said Dominguez Pinto. Dominguez Pinto relocated to Panama in 2014 to make a living teaching English, Spanish & German in Panama City after Venezuela’s economic collapse. Over e-mail, we co-authored a conversational text, exploring migration,…

  • Sophie’s Letter

    During the composition of the letter to her abusive father, Sophie identifies with her inner wounded child (Little Sophie) and gradually finds what she needs to grow beyond the limits and boundaries that were burned into her psyche so many years earlier.

  • In a Foreign Country

    A cinematographic transcreation of a text censored in 1968.

  • In the Embryo of All Things: The Poems of Harry Alan Potamkin

    Between 1920 and his death in 1933, Harry Alan Potamkin wrote poems for literary magazines, workers’ newspapers and Black newspapers. He was first inspired by the example of modernist poets, and as America changed in the days of the Great Depression, so too did Potamkin’s poems, striking an uneasy balance between social vision and aesthetic experimentation. Potamkin’s poems fused elegy, outrage and reportage with the concerns of the ancients. “In the Embryo of All Things” is the first collection of Harry Alan Potamkin’s poems. This volume gathers his complete poems, including a speculative arrangement of his unfinished Spectacle Negre and…

  • Beat

    Caleb is a dancer. He’s also deaf. Caleb experiences music through feeling—and when he meets Thaddeus, a local musician, he begins to feel a lot. A mutual interest in music (and one another) brings the two young men together. Sometimes, love doesn’t have to be complicated.

  • Alia

    Haunted by the memory of civil war, an old Lebanese man revisits the last few moments of a fateful bus ride that leads up to the murder of his beloved.

  • Deema

    After years of living abroad, Deema is reunited with her childhood friend Nidal. When their love blossoms like the Arab Spring, a pain nested deep within suddenly re-surfaces as she fights to revive the phoenix inside of her.

  • The Writer

    A lady writer goes to her favourite restaurant to write her new romance… will it be her own ?

  • BLU In YOU

    Walter Benjamin suggests that film is comparable to surgery, the instrument allowing the operator to penetrate the body of the subject while, paradoxically, maintaining his or her distance. This statement self-reflexively sets up the female spectator at the helm of the art-installation opening of Blu in You—an eloquent essayist film with visual conversations that dissects historical and contemporary representations of the black female body, sexuality and subjectivity. The female spectator (Melanie Smith), views the staged art installation conversations between visual arts curator (Andrea Fatona) and writer (Nalo Hopkinson). The conversations begin with a cultural history of violence, ethnographic display and…