Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World
Sasha Waters · 2026 · 91 minutes
July 22, 2026 · Regal Riviera · 7:00 p.m.
If poetry had a pop icon, Mary Oliver would be it. Celebrated bestseller, Pulitzer Prize winner, lover of dogs and long walks in the woods, openly queer but intensely private, Oliver was America’s unlikely contemporary mystic, stalking the ponds and forests of Cape Cod for nearly 50 years in order to open herself – and her readers – to the known and unknowable world.
From a lonely childhood to literary fame, Oliver’s life was shaped by devotion to nature, paying attention, and the long journey toward learning to love and to be loved. Her poems inspire liberals and conservatives, atheists and believers, naturalists and urbanites, speaking directly to contemporary anxieties about attention, presence, and the human relationship with the natural world – issues that feel especially pressing in an era of climate crisis, digital distraction, and social fragmentation.
Featuring interviews with her close friends, including John Waters, never-before-seen personal photos, notebooks, and correspondence from her archive, and recitations of her work by Stephen Colbert, Lucy Dacus, Steve Buscemi, and Oprah Winfrey, Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World considers the poet’s long lifetime of work in context, capturing the uniqueness of her world and the natural beauty that inspired her.
Programmer’s Note
When I get a chance to teach film criticism at UT, I usually include Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook on the syllabus. It’s my favorite writing guide and, as importantly, it teaches readers how to be better observers — of the world around them, of their own thoughts, of the words on the page, all of which are essential skills for a critic.
So I was thrilled when I first learned Sasha Waters was working on the first feature-length documentary about Oliver. We programmed Sasha’s short, A Partial History of the Natural World, 1965, at Big Ears in 2016. I think it’s fair to say that she’s interested in digging through the visual archive and finding new and interesting connections/conversations there. Saved by the Beauty of the World is different from most docs of our current streaming era in that, formally speaking, it’s essentially a found footage collage, tastefully assembling a patchwork of images for appropriately poetic effect. For example, to summon a sense of Oliver’s traumatic childhood in Appalachian Ohio, Waters pulls clips from J.L. Anderson’s Spring Night Summer Night (1965), which we showed at FFK 2025.
Oliver, it turns out, was a bit of a Zelig character who encountered, worked with, and shared lifelong friendships with some of the most interesting and important characters of 20th-century art, including such surprising personalities (to me, at least) as Norman Mailer, who she worked for briefly, and John Waters, who offers typically cutting and hilarious remembrances of his dear friend. Oliver is something of a hero for me, so I’m glad we get to share this thoughtful memorial to her life and work.