Fragments of Paradise

• KD Davison
• 98 min
• United States
• 2022
• Documentary

Intimate and illuminating about the life and work, vision and poetics of Jonas Mekas, the godfather of American avant-garde film.

“I’m not interested in reality, I’m interested in poetry,’ says Mekas, who filmed what he saw almost every day for seventy years. He was also a writing poet, a devoted patron of analog film, founder of the magazine “Film Culture” and Anthology Film Archives in New York, and a forerunner who had great influence on filmmakers such as Warhol, Walters, Scorsese, and Jarmusch, as they themselves testify to in this documentary. Fragments of Paradise works excellently both as an introduction for the uninitiated and as a deeper dive for those who know their Mekas. It is a film that convincingly takes us to New York’s simmering art and film scene and gets close to the man and the artist without getting stuck in myths. Jonas Mekas may have gone out of time in 2019, but lives on in this film.

- Johan Blomqvist

• Film om film
• Dokumentär
• Stad
• Konst
• Historia