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VANCOUVER PREMIERE // DIRECTOR IN ATTENDANCE
Polis Is This explores acclaimed poet Charles Olson's amazing world, where the ordinary landscapes of our daily lives become extraordinary portals to timeless truths about the places we inhabit.
More than three decades after his death, Olson remains an original American master. The story of the enigmatic and hulking six-foot-eight poet drifts back to the Glouchester, Mass., the fishing port of his boyhood summers. There he forged transcendent vision that links his besieged town, caught between tradition and modernity, to all places—in all times.
The film traces Olson's process of self-discovery and makes it clear why Kerouac, Ginsberg and others travelled to Glouchester to meet the father of literary postmodernism. Polis Is This breaks new ground in exploring Olson's personal and literary life—from his ideas on education, politics and the moral nature of his work to his personal relations with friends and family. The film combines interviews, archival footage, commentary (featuring John Malkovich) and animation into a single, triumphant voice.
Henry Ferrini has been producing award-winning films from his Cape Ann studio for close to thirty years. These films include: Lowell Blues: The Words of Jack Kerouac with Johnny Depp; Radio Fishtown, winner of the Bravo Best Documentary, which tells the story of a stubborn, crotchety one-man radio station operator who brings classical music to a hardscrabble town; Witch City, an uncompromising look at Salem, Massachusetts, a town that put the phrase “witch hunt” into the American vocabulary and Poem in Action which probes the magical space where life and literature synergistically intertwine as it explores the poet’s commitment to the unity of art and life.
"A beautifully composed homage to one of the few truly monumental American poets of our times." —Jack Hirschman, Poet Laureate of San Francisco
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