Directed by Sasha Waters, Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World is a documentary portrait of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning poet of the natural world.
Featuring in the documentary are interviews with Oliver’s close friends, including John Waters, never-before-seen personal photos, notebooks, and correspondence from her archive, and recitations of her work by Stephen Colbert, Lucy Dacus, Steve Buscemi, Maria Shriver, and Oprah Winfrey.
The film made its world premiere at the 2026 True/False Film Festival and is scheduled to open in theaters starting on July 3 in New York at the IFC Center via Kino Lorber.
If poetry had a pop icon, Mary Oliver would be it. Celebrated best-selling poet, Pulitzer Prize-winner, lover of dogs and long walks in the woods, openly queer but intensely private, Oliver was America’s unlikely contemporary mystic, stalking the ponds and forests of Cape Cod for nearly fifty years in order to open herself – and her readers – to the known and unknowable world. From a lonely childhood to literary fame, Oliver’s life was shaped by devotion to nature, paying attention, and the long journey toward learning to love and to be loved. Her poems inspire liberals and conservatives, atheists and believers, naturalists and urbanites, speaking directly to contemporary anxieties about attention, presence, and the human relationship with the natural world – issues that feel especially pressing in an era of climate crisis, digital distraction, and social fragmentation.
Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World considers the poet’s long lifetime of work in context, capturing the uniqueness of her world and the natural beauty that inspired her.
“It’s so hard to make a movie about poetry, but cinematic translator Sasha Waters has nailed it,” said Kino Lorber Chairman & CEO Richard Lorber. “Oliver’s words and Waters’ frames work together to dissolve that elusive membrane separating interior and exterior worlds, with enthralling, vividly visualized correlatives of what Oliver learns from nature in examining her own complex emotions. Fueled by poetry, it’s filmic fusion to be cherished.”
Watch the official trailer for Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World above.
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