Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World (Sasha Waters Freyer, 2026)

Born in Maple Heights, Ohio, in 1935, Mary Oliver became an acclaimed poet and essayist, winning a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1984 for American Primitive and a National Book Award in 1992 for the collection New and Selected Poems, Volume One. Saved by the Beauty of the World beautifully captures the life and work of the prolific poet who the New York Times called “far and away, this country’s best-selling poet.” Oliver studied at both Ohio State and Vassar College but did not receive a degree from either. Strongly influenced by Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, she found lifelong inspiration in the natural world. She guarded her privacy and enjoyed a 40-year-long relationship with the photographer Molly Malone Cook. Featuring recitations of Oliver’s work by Stephen Colbert, Lucy Dacus, Steve Buscemi, and Oprah Winfrey, plus an appearance by John Waters. The Wex’s Film/Video Studio provided substantial postproduction support toward the completion of the film. Join filmmaker Sasha Waters Freyer for a Q&A following the film. (91 mins., DCP)

About the filmmaker

Sasha Waters Freyer 

Sasha Waters Freyer is a moving-image artist trained in photography and film whose work occupies the intersection of intimate experience and public discourse. She charts territory unseen in industrial cinema, telling stories from the critical margins of culture, which are, in the words of Wendell Berry, “always freeholds of wildness.” Her features and experimental short films have screened on the Sundance Channel and nationally on PBS, at the Tribeca, Woodstock, Big Sky, and Ann Arbor film festivals, the National Museum for Women in the Arts, the LA Film Forum, and Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, among other venues. Sasha’s films have been reviewed in ArtForum, The New Yorker, Variety, IndieWIRE, and Mother Jones; her writing has appeared in Millennium Film Journal, Teachers & Writers Magazine, Ethnos, and the Quarterly Review of Film & Video. She is the chair of the Department of Photography + Film at Virginia Commonwealth University, which is ranked as the number one public art school in the United States.