Franz Wright: Last Words, A Cinematic Meditation On Leaving

A documentary unlike any other, set to the words that Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Franz Wright secretly recorded for his wife Beth Oehlkers Wright during the years he battled against terminal cancer.

In a 2014 letter, Wright told a friend: "Sometimes working at night I will carry that small recorder around and talk to it with a sense of speaking directly to the future Beth, and I don't mention this to her, but imagine her coming across it one day by accident."

Wright would die the following year. In a genuine manifestation from beyond the grave,Last Words honors the pain and the majesty of his life-long devotion to poetry and the gift of love that he fought to unfold even in the face of death.

M. A. Littler’s subtle, almost static, but powerfully affecting visual meditation, cued to Wright’s voice and a gossamer score, captures poetry as it comes into being, a beautiful rumination on the life of the poet, the poignancy of mortality, and the meaning of love that sustains the high note of lament for the dissipation of experience into memory, and memory into darkness, capturing it in its passage and caressing it as it goes.

An open conversation with the film maker M.A. Littler and Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright will follow.