Spoon
Director Michka Saal
Countries Canada
Duration 66 min
Synopsis
The dialogue between Spoon — a black American poet condemned to a life-sentence — and me started inside a prison, where I had come to research a film. A suitcase full of letters and numerous telephone calls later, Spoon’s words are a strange consolation to me, while my listening is, for him, a window to the outside world. The film was born out of the desire to measure the power of language, both his poetry and his activist prose, and to share his new definitions of Time and what he calls Realness. I try to represent his absence in the world, and to imprint his political and poetic journey on the dunes of his beloved Mohave Desert and on my own interior landscapes. Thirty-eight years from prison to prison. As Spoon says, if I didn’t write, I would be a shadow boxing death.
The dialogue between Spoon — a black American poet condemned to a life-sentence — and me started inside a prison, where I had come to research a film. A suitcase full of letters and numerous telephone calls later, Spoon’s words are a strange consolation to me, while my listening is, for him, a window to the outside world. The film was born out of the desire to measure the power of language, both his poetry and his activist prose, and to share his new definitions of Time and what he calls Realness. I try to represent his absence in the world, and to imprint his political and poetic journey on the dunes of his beloved Mohave Desert and on my own interior landscapes. Thirty-eight years from prison to prison. As Spoon says, if I didn’t write, I would be a shadow boxing death.