Mary Oliver, Saved by the Beauty of the World - Director Sasha Waters

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. 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.About the filmmaker - Director, Producer, Co-editor Sasha Waters is a moving image artist trained in photography and 16mm cinema. Her films pursue ecstatic, metaphorical realism from the relations and materials of ordinary life. Her 2018 feature Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable won a Special Jury Prize at the SXSW Film Festival, and her 2024 short Ghost Protists had its premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. She is a 2026-2027 recipient of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship and a Professor of Film at VCU’s School of the Arts in Richmond, VA. Her other films include; This American Gothic (2008), Chekhov for Children (2010, feature), You Can See the Sun in Late December (2010), An Incomplete History of the Travelogue, 1925 (2012), Our Summer Made Her Light Escape (2012), An Incomplete History of Pornography, 1979 (2013), Burn Out the Day (2014), A Partial History of the Natural World, 1965 (2015), Garden of Stone, (2015), dragons & seraphim (2017).