Register here

Join the HRC and VCUarts for a screening of Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World, including a Q&A with director Sasha Waters.

Description

From a lonely childhood to literary fame, her life was shaped by devotion to nature, paying attention, and the long journey toward learning to love and to be loved. If poetry had a pop icon, Mary Oliver would be it.  

The first cinematic portrait of the beloved American poet, the film shares never-before-seen personal photos, notebooks and letters from her archive, as well as readings by Helena Bonham Carter, Steve Buscemi, Stephen Colbert, Lucy Dacus, Josh Hamilton, Jesse Welles, and Oprah Winfrey, and interviews with former U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón, writer and MacArthur Fellow Jason Reynolds, Mary’s old friends Maria Shriver and John Waters, and many more.

About the Filmmaker

Sasha Waters is a moving image artist trained in photography and 16mm cinema who has produced and directed more than twenty documentary and experimental films. Embracing a personal, artisanal approach to craft, she served as cinematographer and sound editor on ten of her films and as editor on all but one. 

Sasha's latest film, Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World, opened July 2nd at the IFC Center in New York and screened at more than fifty theaters nationwide in advance of its broadcast on the acclaimed PBS series American Masters on August 25th, 2026. 

A professor of Film and Art Foundation at VCUarts, Sasha is included in Edited By: Women Film Editors, a survey of women who "invented, developed, fine-tuned and revolutionized the art of film editing," and in the FemEx Film Archive, an ongoing collective archive of interviews with feminist experimental filmmakers.