Poetry of Resilience
Documentary · In Pre-Production
Resilience Films
Synopsis
In September of 2006, thirteen extraordinary individuals from such diverse countries as Japan, Rwanda, Poland, Kurdistan, Vietnam, Iran, and China gathered at a conference in a small country town in Massachusetts.
These men and women have two things in common: they survived some of the greatest horrors of modern history and they are all poets. They came together for the first time ever to talk, not only about the atrocities they endured, but also about the resiliency of the human spirit.
The feature-length documentary Poetry of Resilience traces the paths of seven of these poets back in time until the moment of their meeting.
As we follow these survivors into their pasts and listen to accounts of their present lives–from the stark, mountainous landscape of Kurdistan to the rainforests of Vietnam, from a bungalow in East LA to a Chicago building crowded with generations of a Chinese family, and from such atrocities like Hiroshima to the Holocaust–we find that resilience means something different to each.
The story of humanity is laced with cruelty. Many die, while one lives. Someone survives systematic destruction, just by chance. A Japanese boy happens to be under a bridge when the atom bomb is dropped; a hopeful Rwandan teacher travels abroad on a Fulbright Scholarship just four months before his family and hundreds of thousands of his people are slaughtered; a seven-year old Jewish girl takes refuge in a hole in the ground while the Nazis search the Polish village where she has been hiding.
The film will not only reveal these personal stories, but also examine how each of these survivors discover and used poetry to translate individual experiences into an image, a memory, or an idea. Whether they write poems to witness, to remember, to take revenge, to forgive, or to curse, in every case poetry helped their spirits rebound, and come back to life.
One of the film's poets, Majid Nafici, who fought the Shah in Iran and then witnessed the killing of his family by the Ayatollah Khomeini, offers the way he has found to go on.
"Artistic creativity," he says, "is the only thing left to you as a survivor."
Poetry of Resilience traces the paths of these poets to the heart of the mystery of human endurance by asking: What is the resilience of the spirit? How does poetry, as a deeply felt yet ineffable expression of our common humanity, help transform lives? And what lessons are there for the rest of us to learn from their remarkable stories?