Screening times:
Monday, November 3, 6:30 PM
Healing Through Poetry | Asiah Sparks | Canada | 2025 | 21m - director attending!
Lost Chapters | Lorena Alvaredo | Venezuela | 2024 | 67m
Afterwords Literary Festival presents new 20-minute documentary Healing Through Poetry by former Youth Poet Laureate Asiah Sparks. The short doc will screen at 6:30 PM, followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker! Following the Q&A, 67-minute Venezuelan narrative feature Lost Chapters will screen.
About Healing Through Poetry:
A mini documentary about a transformative workshop designed for Black women, providing a nurturing space to engage in open conversations while acknowledging the intersectionality beyond a shared black identity. Through engaging dialogues, storytelling, poetry, and shared reflections, we embrace the beauty of being Black women, celebrate our unique culture and contributions, and create sisterhood through poetry.
About Asiah Sparks:
Asiah Sparks was Halifax's Youth Poet Laureat from 2023-24. She is a young writer, storyteller, spoken word artist and activist. Through her work, Asiah aims to cultivate a sense of community and inclusion. Asiah is an African Nova Scotian teenager currently living in Dartmouth and stemming from the historically Black community of Lake Loon/Cherry Brook. Using poetry as a mode of expression to deal with and convey their feelings, Asiah writes that they found poetry while "aimlessly wandering" and now write to connect with communities and youth specifically who might feel like odds are stacked against them. In addition to being Halifax’s first Youth Poet Laureate, her past accomplishments include Provincial Volunteer of the Year Award and HRM Volunteer of the year Award in 2022.
About Lost Chapters:
Bathed in sunlight and the warm glow of nostalgia, Lost Chapters captures moments of a family’s life in Caracas. After years of living overseas, Ena has returned to her childhood home to search for a sense of grounding. She spends her days rifling through books alongside her father who is on a mission to archive rare Venezuelan titles, in order to protect Venezuela’s cultural heritage from the grasp of dictatorship. The two spend time with Ena’s lovely grandmother, who too is on her own journey of identity as she loses her memory. When Ena happens upon a forgotten Venezuelan author, her unmooredness is catalyzed into an obsessive quest of her own, which unveils an intuitive interconnectedness between these writings, her grandmother’s memories, and her search for self-identity. The debut feature of filmmaker Lorena Alvarado, Lost Chapters is a remarkable meditation on the quiet hours of life, on what we pass on to our future selves and generations, and on what lingers even when forgotten on the surface. (Words: Kelly Li)
Tickets $15 ($15 cash at the door if available)
