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"I think the funnest part of running a bookstore is treasure hunting...going through those boxes and coming up with hidden treasures," says Jeffrey Frase, owner of Cameron's Books, the second-oldest used-book store in Portland, Oregon. "It's just like being a kid again." Directors Jin Ryu and Yi-Fan Lu spent two months getting to know Frase before asking if they could film this five-minute documentary.
To film the documentary TITOS: A Poet in Precarious Balance, director Nikos Chrisikakis accompanied Titos Patrikios for eighteen months in the eighty-three-year-old poet's native Athens, Greece.
Directed by Katja Esson, Poetry of Resilience is a documentary about six international poets who individually survived Hiroshima, the Holocaust, China's Cultural Revolution, the Kurdish Genocide in Iraq, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Iranian Revolution. For more information, visit www.poetryofresilience.com.
This week Picador is publishing a tenth-anniversary edition of Barbara Ehrenreich's best-selling book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. This clip, from the 2007 documentary The American Ruling Class, features Ehrenreich and former Harper's editor Lewis Lapham.
Shot and produced by Almudena Toral, this video documents seventy-six-year-old New York poet Jack Agüeros's struggle with Alzheimer's disease. Agüeros, a community advocate who directed El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem for eight years, is the author of four poetry collections, including Lord, Is This a Psalm? (Hanging Loose Press, 2002).
Back in 2001 Shaun Winter bought a ticket for twenty-one days of unlimited travel on the Greyhound Bus Line. In three weeks he covered six thousand miles while making a film, Untitled Paintings, and writing a book, 21 Days on a Greyhound Bus.
For his new documentary film, Page One: Inside the New York Times, filmmaker Andrew Rossi gained unprecedented access to the paper's newsroom and the inner workings of the Media Desk for a year. Check out the footage of David Carr, a reporter, Media Equations columnist, and author of The Night of the Gun, a memoir published by Simon & Schuster in 2008.
The documentary film Committing Poetry in Times of War tells the story of Bill Nevins, a humanities teacher and youth poetry coach who was suspended and later fired from his teaching job after standing up for a student who wrote a poem critical of the war in Iraq. The entire film can be seen at Snagfilms.com.
The documentary film To Be Heard, which made its debut last November and won a grand jury prize and the audience award at the film festival Doc NYC, follows three teens from the South Bronx whose struggle to change their lives begins when they start to write poetry.
The Welcome, which premiered at the Ashland Independent Film Festival in Oregon last month, is a documentary film about a group of veterans who met over Memorial Day weekend in 2008 to use poetry and storytelling to come to terms with their experiences in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. You can read some of the resulting poems and watch videos of the veterans reading them at The Welcome Home Project's website.
