This is a special Double-Feature! Both screenings are followed by Q&As moderated by Jeff M. Giordano.

Poet Neeli Cherkovski (It’s Nice To Be With You Always) and director Anita Chang (Tongues of Heaven) are expected to be in attendance!

First up we have: It’s Nice To Be With You Always directed by Kyle Harvey.

This is a documentary that blends together cinéma-vérité style footage and conversations to create an intimate portrait of the poet Neeli Cherkovski.

Imagine being dropped into the middle of a poem!

Neeli Cherkovski is the author of many books of poetry, including Elegy For My Beat Generation (2018) From the Canyon Outward (2009), and The Crow and I (2015). He was the co-editor of Anthology of L.A. Poets (with Charles Bukowski) and Cross-Strokes: Poetry between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Cherkovski also wrote biographies of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Charles Bukowski, as well as the critical memoir Whitman’s Wild Children (1988). His papers are held at the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. He has lived in San Francisco since 1974.

(48 minutes)

Tongues of Heaven directed by Anita Chang.

“You already know the importance of saving a language. The main point is that you must start doing it. You know the reason, but not the motivation to save it. This is where I’m confused. You can also say I’m waiting for that something,” admits An-Chi Chen, one of the youth directors for Tongues of Heaven. Set in Taiwan and Hawaiʻi, territories where languages of the Austronesian family are spoken, this experimental documentary focuses on the questions, desires and challenges of young indigenous peoples to learn the languages of their forebears — languages that are endangered or facing extinction. Using digital video as the primary medium of expression, four young indigenous women from divergent backgrounds together collaborate and exchange ideas to consider the impact of language on identity and culture. With 96% of the world’s population speaking only 4% of the world’s languages, what does it mean to speak your mother tongue in this age of language homogenization? To put it another way, what do you lose when you lose your native language? These are just some of the questions that these women, with camera in hand, ask themselves, their families and peers.

(60 minutes; closed-captioned in English; in Mandarin/English/Truku/Hawaiian/Rukai/Tsou Kanakanavu)