The Cinema of Poetry: Paths of Five Filmmakers

The Cinema of Poetry: Paths of Five Filmmakers is a passionate and reflective journey into the poetic dimension of cinema, exploring the unique visions of five legendary directors: Jean Cocteau, Luis Buñuel, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Ingmar Bergman. Written by Hamid Oqabi—a Yemeni-born filmmaker, writer, and visual artist—the book offers a deeply personal and intellectually rich encounter with a cinema that dares to dream, question, and resist.

Rather than presenting an academic or historical study, this book gathers a series of essays and meditative texts written between 2007 and 2024. These writings are tied together by a powerful longing for a cinema that goes beyond entertainment—a cinema that engages with philosophy, poetry, memory, spirituality, and rebellion.

Each director is given space to breathe. Oqabi explores Cocteau’s surreal dreamscapes, especially in The Blood of a Poet, and analyzes Buñuel’s sharp attacks on bourgeois society, most notably in The Phantom of Liberty. He reflects on Tarkovsky’s spiritual minimalism, his longing for home and soul, and how his films sculpt time and silence.

With Pasolini, Oqabi examines the fierce political and mythic energy in films like Medea and Teorema, and discusses how Pasolini used color, bodies, and sacred symbols to challenge materialist ideologies. In the case of Bergman, the book dives into the haunting power of The Seventh Seal, the metaphysical silence of God, and the poetic tension in his dialogues and compositions.

But this book is more than just a tribute to five filmmakers. It is also a window into Hamid Oqabi’s own artistic path. His deep connection to the cinema of poetry is visible across his work—as a director, essayist, poet, and painter. He views cinema not only as storytelling but as a philosophical and emotional force. For Oqabi, poetic cinema is a gesture of resistance against systems of control—religious, political, economic—and against a global culture that increasingly favors noise, speed, consumption, and superficiality.

In a world that often celebrates violence, profit, and spectacle, these five filmmakers offer something else: a cinema of inner life, of silence and slowness, of mystery and humanity. Their films act like cinematic poems—evoking, rather than explaining; haunting, rather than concluding.

The Cinema of Poetry: Paths of Five Filmmakers is both a homage and a manifesto. It invites readers, creators, and thinkers to rediscover cinema as a space of beauty, doubt, depth, and transformation. For Oqabi, these films are not just artistic objects—they are living texts, prophetic visions that still speak to our age of chaos and collapse.

This book is ideal for those interested in art cinema, poetic thought, and cross-cultural dialogue. It is a reminder that cinema, at its most daring, can be a way of thinking, a way of healing, and a way of resisting the emptiness of the world.