Rita Dove: An American Poet
| Rita Dove: An American Poet | |
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Photo by Eduardo Montes-Bradley. Staunton, VA.
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| Directed by | Eduardo Montes-Bradley |
| Produced by | Heritage Film Project |
| Starring | Rita Dove |
| Music by | Judith Shatin, Franz Peter Schubert, Johann Sebastian Bach |
| Distributed by | Alexander Street Press Filmakers Library, Kanopy |
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Release date
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Running time
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50 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
Rita Dove: An American Poet is a documentary film produced, directed and edited by Eduardo Montes-Bradley. It is a biographical sketch of U.S. Poet Laureate and National Medal of Arts winner Rita Dove. The film explores the poet's life beyond the otherwise extensive and readily available information in Internet and Social Media, exposing fundamental facts of Dove's childhood and formative years growing up in Akron, Ohio in the 1950s and during the turbulent 1960s.
The film, distributed by Filmakers Library and Alexander Street Press, USA, premiered at The Paramount, on January 31, 2014, presented as a Martin Luther King Day headliner by the Office for Diversity and Equity, Lifetime Learning, Alumni and Parent Engagement and the Department of English, College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia. Opening remarks honoring Rita Dove by Boyd Tinsley. Rita Dove: An American Poet was shot in digital format, HD.
The film is made of a series of in-depth, on-camera interviews with Poet Laureate Rita Dove—conducted and recorded between September 2012 and October 2013. These interviews were edited with hundreds of still images and several hours of home movies from the Dove family's collection. The intimacy of the dialogue between Rita Dove and Montes-Bradley's camera provide a rare personal insight into the wide range of Dove's artistic passions. Most of these images are the results of the efforts of Rita Dove's father (Ray A. Dove) to record family life in the 1950s and 1960s. Mr. Ray Dove recorded in 8mm and Super 8mm birthdays, the opening of gifts on Christmas Day year after year, holidays and family excursions. According to the filmmaker, "Rita's father is omnipresent and perhaps the silent protagonist of the film as he captured images of Rita which have become fundamental clues to the evolution of the suburban middle class African American child into the celebrated poet we know and recognize."
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