Next month, The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth will screen the new documentary Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World. The film opens for a limited engagement on July 10 through July 12. Directed and produced by Sasha Waters, the film considers Oliver’s life and work and how natural beauty was a big inispiration, but also, the director dug deeper.
“There’s a public image of Mary Oliver as being almost saintly,” Waters told Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts. “And she’s not. She was very human and very much in the world. She had her struggles, like everyone does.
“The film is a portrait of her whole life. It considers the way her life was shaped by paying attention to the natural world and her resilience in the face of childhood trauma.”
Film synopsis: If poetry had a pop icon, Mary Oliver would be it. Celebrated bestseller, Pulitzer Prize winner, lover of dogs and long walks in the woods, openly queer but intensely private, Oliver was America’s unlikely contemporary mystic, stalking the ponds and forests of Cape Cod for nearly 50 years in order to open herself – and her readers – to the known and unknowable world. From a lonely childhood to literary fame, Oliver’s life was shaped by devotion to nature, paying attention, and the long journey toward learning to love and to be loved. Her poems inspire liberals and conservatives, atheists and believers, naturalists and urbanites, speaking directly to contemporary anxieties about attention, presence, and the human relationship with the natural world – issues that feel especially pressing in an era of climate crisis, digital distraction and social fragmentation.
The film features interviews with Oliver’s close friends like John Waters. Notable celebs Stephen Colbert, Lucy Dacus, Steve Buscemi, Oprah Winfrey and others recite her work alongside footage of never-before-seen personal photos, notebooks, and correspondence from her archive.
Watch the trailer below:
–Rich Lopez