Événement

NWFF - Local Sightings-Poetry in Wartime

(Rick King, 2004, DVD, 74min.)
Poetry in Wartime is a feature-length documentary that sharply etches the experience of war through powerful images and the words of poets unknown and world-famous. Soldiers, journalists, historians and experts on combat interviewed in Poetry in Wartime add diverse perspectives on war's effects on soldiers, civilians and society. In Poetry in Wartime, poets around the world, from the United States and Colombia to Britain and Nigeria to Iraq and India, share their views and experiences of war that extend beyond national borders and into the depth of the human soul.

The film also brings to life how poetry and war have been intertwined since the beginning of recorded historyÃÂfrom ancient Babylonia and the fields of TroyÃÂto the great conflicts of the 20th century and the current war in Iraq. The stirring words of poets of the past - Homer, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, Walt Whitman and Shoda Shinoe from Hiroshima are combined with more recent voices: a Vietnam vet, poets in war-torn Baghdad, a poet whose family experienced the devastating war in Biafra. The poetry moves us to the emotion of war explained to us by soldiers, journalists and a doctor who have experienced the effects of combat firsthand. The poetry illuminates the reality. And the documentary reality helps us to understand the poetry. Together they sear the experience, emotions and sacrifices of war into our hearts and minds.