In 1244, Jelaluddin Rumi, a Sufi scholar in Konya, Turkey, met an itinerant dervish, Shams of Tabriz. A powerful friendship ensued. When Shams died, the grieving Rumi gripped a pole in his garden, and turning round it, began reciting imagistic poetry about inner life and love of God. After Rumi's death, his son founded the Mevlevi Sufi order, the whirling dervishes. Lovers of Rumi's poems comment on their power and meaning, including religious historian Huston Smith, writer Simone Fattal, poet Robery Bly, and Coleman Barks, who reworks literal translations of Rumi into poetic English. Musicians accompany Barks and Bly as they recite their versions of several of Rumi's ecstatic poems.
The Sufi and the Scientist is the collective story of Sufi healer Sayyid Arif Hussain, the medieval ...

A biography of the poet W. B. Yeats and his contribution to the Irish independence movement as a Pro...

Five gay Black men who are HIV-positive discuss how they are battling the double stigmas surrounding...
Follows the young people of Selma, Alabama's RATCo (Random Acts of Theatre Company) as they journey ...

Fernando Lemos, a Portuguese surrealist artist, fled from dictatorship to Brazil in 1952 searching f...

NIN E TEPUEIAN - MY CRY is a documentary tracks the journey of Innu poet, actress and activist, Nata...

Song is a story of the last Finnish rune singer and his pupil, and the comforting power of singing.

Award winning documentary by Joslyn Rose Lyons exploring the relationship between spiritual connecti...

By ending the life of Jean Senac on August 30, 1973 in Algiers, his assassins believed they would si...

Portrait of the writer Elsa Triolet, wife of poet Louis Aragon. The tile is a play on a famous poem ...

This documentary highlights the evolution of Brazil's Circo Voador venue from homespun artists' perf...
Poetic stroll in the work of Jean Genet.

Documentary tracing the extreme life of outlaw writer, performance artist and punk icon, Kathy Acker...

In his lifetime, Thomas Merton was hailed as a prophet and censured for his outspoken social critici...

How the inventor of the detective story became his own greatest mystery.

Cacaso, a Brazilian poet, lived in Rio de Janeiro. Born Antonio Carlos de Brito (1944-1987) he was o...

An unconventional biography by Oscar nominee Paola di Florio and Sundance winner Lisa Leeman about H...

In this portrait film, we meet Inger Christensen in her apartment in Østerbro, Copenhagen, where she...