katya yakubov

As Audre Lorde wrote, “Of all the art forms, poetry is the most economical. It is the one which is the most secret, which requires the least physical labor, the least material, and the one which can be done between shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the subway, and on scraps of surplus paper…” 

Writing poetry was exactly that for me, a way to continue feeling connected despite a seeming lull in my creative life. It also became my gateway to returning to filmmaking in 2014, after a several year hiatus. By setting spoken poems to moving images or structuring a short film as a visual poem instead of a narrative progression, I felt released from the physical, economic, and durational restrictions of narrative or documentary filmmaking.

These three cinepoems echo my conviction that filmmaking, at its core, functions something like poetry, through an alchemy that happens when seemingly disparate elements come together and activate each other in unpredictable ways.