AFTER
Bringing The Dead Back To Life
A performance film. Color and black and white. 60 and 90 minutes version.
AFTER, a compelling and fresh take on Holocaust documentaries, explores and showcases poetry written by renowned poets responding to the Shoah and its aftermath in an increasingly divided and violent world.
THE FILM
AFTER is a performance documentary designed as a poetic anthology. A cast of famed poet’s their performance, and movie-making becomes the main characters, and the wide range of works provide a unique literary response about the deepest and most fundamental human questions.
AFTER is a bold, emotionally compelling visual tour de force conceived by award winning director Richard Kroehling and photographed by Academy Award and Sundance Indie Spirit award cinematographer, Lisa Rinzler. In AFTER, viewers do not see the devastation but see the small, sometimes almost imperceptible effects of its aftermath. The film is ultimately about human resiliency in times of chaos, the power and the courage to forge new lives and the value of poetry in looking to the past to deepen one’s understanding and continue. https://vimeo.com/143217654
The works of poets including MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellow Edward Hirsch, Pulitzer Prize-nominated and founder of Cave Canem, Cornelius Eady, multi-award winner Alicia Suskin Ostriker, poet and famed poet Leonard Cohen; acclaimed spoken-word poet Taylor Mali (HBO’s Def Jam) and Academy Award winning actor and poet Geza Roehrig (The Son of Saul and starring in Terrence Mallick’s yet unnamed new film playing Jesus!) and more have been filmed. Intimate and elegiac, the poems are interwoven with images of loss, and/or beginning anew. The look and feel of each poem’s visual stylization invites and draws the viewer in to engage with the interactive energy of each piece as seemingly commonplace details explode with new meaning. Images of the modern world are invoked as much as the past to create a deeply personal connection to the poets, the film’s main characters. AFTER illuminates poetry’s place in a world that continues to grapple with existential threat, catastrophe, and genocide.
