Letters Not About Love

Two people separated by history, politics and language come together in this postmodern love story where the protagonists meet only once. In “Letters Not About Love”, director Jacki Ochs´ most innovative documentary, two poets, an American and a Russian, decide to play a game that leads them to an unexpectedly intimate relationship. Our two passionate narrators, Lyn Hejinian and Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, inadvertently take us on a tour of their own cultural idiosyncracies. But we are never tourists in their imaginations or their countries; instead, we become miraculously involved. Ochs builds visual bridges out of words by combining home movie clips, archival images and stunning new footage. “Letters Not About Love” reads like a documentary and flows like rivers of paint on an expressionist canvas. The director combines narrative, travelogue and memoir in a fusion of image, sound and word that is a total sensual experience. Shot in and around the poets´ homes in Northern California and the former Soviet Union, the camera focuses on farmers´ markets, park benches, beauty contests and demolition derbies, zooms into the food on the table of a typical family dinner, and finds a bug sipping nectar off a flower. What Ochs discovers in these ordinary events is precisely what makes them extraordinary. In “Letters Not About Love”, the passion of memory is harnessed to the project of human survival. “Letters Not About Love” presents a challenging meditation on the meaning of language, culture and implicitly, love. The filmmaker initiated the correspondence by giving both poets a list of ordinary words and asking them, in each letter, to reflect one of the words – its conventional meaning as well as what it means to them. As an unfolding examination of their lives, the film becomes a dynamic expression of cultural differences and the art of mutual understanding.