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Treatment

In September, 2006, 13 extraordinary men and women from such diverse countries as Rwanda, Japan, Poland, Kurdistan, Vietnam, Iran, and China gathered at a conference at the Guthrie Center in small town Massachusetts. They met because they have two things in common: they survived some of the greatest atrocities of modern history, and they are poets. At the conference they came together for the first time ever to talk, not about the horrors they endured, but about the resilience of the human spirit.

Poetry of Resilience is a feature-length documentary by Academy Award® nominated director Katja Esson that traces the lives of six of these poets who collectively survived Hiroshima, the Holocaust, China's Cultural Revolution under Mao, Saddam's Gas Attacks on the Kurds, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Iranian Revolution. The film reveals these survivors' personal stories and examines how each one first discovered – and then used – poetry to distill his or her experiences into an image, a memory, an idea.

A Japanese boy happens to be under a bridge when the atom bomb is dropped; a Rwandan professor obtains a Fulbright Scholarship in the US and is helpless as his family and one million of his people 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; a young Chinese boy watches his father dragged from his home by soldiers to be imprisoned and tortured; a Kurdish family flees over the mountains, days before the gas bombs are dropped.

As we follow these survivors into their past and listen to accounts of their present lives, we find that resilience means something different to each. Whether they write to witness, to remember, to take revenge, to forgive, to curse, in every case poetry helped their spirits rebound into life.

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 follows 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 can the rest of us learn from their remarkable stories? Giving voice to survivors of genocide, war and political violence, the film serves as an intense, provocative meditation on the creativity and dynamism of humanity.