The 2026 Milwaukee Film Festival is moving into its final days, but there were still some traditions that needed to be carried out. One of them was the Super Secret Members Only Screening for Milwaukee Film members. It’s always a mystery movie which the audience doesn’t know until moments before it starts. This year they unwrapped the upcoming PBS documentary MARY OLIVER: SAVED BY THE BEAUTY OF THE WORLD.
Mary Oliver is the Pulitzer Prize winning, best-selling poet of my life to date who incorporated the natural world into her poetry in the traditions of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. That doesn’t mean that she had the same cultural footprint as, say, Stephen King but she was well known and much loved by her readers. Hence, an American Masters documentary on PBS.
In many ways, I can just say PBS American Masters documentary and you know what to expect. It will be well researched. It will cover her life story. There will be some famous talking heads. It won’t ruffle too many feathers. There will be readings of some of her more famous works. There will be archival footage. It will delve into her personal life. You know what to expect.
None of that is bad and all those elements show up in the film itself. But, what makes the film a candidate for a featured presentation during a film festival instead of something that you can wait until it airs on PBS is always a question worth asking.
In this case, director Sasha Waters goes beyond the requirements and tries to capture visually the mood and subject of Mary Oliver’s poetry. There is extensive use of archival footage to capture the look and feel of the times described. There’s extensive nature footage representing the mood and subject of Mary Oliver’s poetry. And it’s all assembled artfully. This isn’t an experimental piece of art, but it goes the extra step from being a dry assembly of facts and recollections. It reflects a director that cares about her subject. Also, there are lots of dogs.
Likewise, Sasha Waters goes the extra mile in making sure that the talking heads are meaningful. Even the celebrity talking heads, most notably, Stephen Colbert, have insightful things to say. And the poets and acquaintances are all remarkably well spoken, as you would hope you would get from people who make their living shaping words. Even the criticism is insightful. Best of all, John Waters was a friend of Mary Oliver and he brings his trademark don’t give a fuck frankness to the proceedings and is both a faithful friend and a funny truth-teller whenever he’s on screen, which is frequent.
Ultimately, the film doesn’t stray too far from the model. But even within the model’s constraints, it’s well put together and more insightful and informative than it needed to be. But, with its poetic imagery, it transcends from television to cinema. It doesn’t rewrite the rules of cinema, but it play very nicely within them.
The 2026 Milwaukee Film Festival runs from April 16, 2026 until May 30, 2026. MARY OLIVER: SAVED BY BEAUTY won’t play again at the film festival but should get a theatrical release by Kino Lorber this summer as prelude for its airing on PBS. Tickets to the final day of the film festival can still be purchased at MKEFILM.ORG.
