UB Poetics Program To Present Film

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- "Letters Not About Love," a unique film collaboration between American poet Lyn Hejinian, Russian poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko and American filmmaker Jacki Ochs, will be presented by the UB Poetics Program at 4 p.m. Dec. 1 in the Screening Room, Room 112 of the Center for the Arts on the North Campus.

The screening, presented as part of UB's fall literary series, Wednesdays at 4 PLUS, will be free of charge and open to the public.

The hour-long, 16mm film is based on a five-year correspondence between Hejinian and Dragomoshchenko and has won several awards, including a Best Documentary Feature Award at the Southwest Film Festival.

Performance artist and composer Laurie Anderson has called it "a gorgeous meditation on the mysteries of language and place. Using a written exchange between two writers who riff on definitions of one- and two-syllable words, Ochs has created a fascinating double portrait of the United States and Russia, which emerges through evocative images and stories…a truly beautiful and original film," Anderson says.

Narrated by Lili Taylor and Victor Nord, the film also is distinguished by Larry Ochs' striking score -- with additional music by Sergey Kuryokhin -- and by what one critic called James Livingston's "glorious photography."

The film also will be presented Dec. 7 and 17 as part of the New York Museum of Modern Art series "Filmfest -- Films from the independent states of the former Soviet Union." It is the only American-directed film in the MoMA series, which is a tribute to Aleksandr Pushkin on the 200th anniversary of his birth.