Defining a new genre of poetry and art, the short film Grief Becomes Me opens a window into the creative life of poet Donna Hilbert.  If poetry, as claimed by author Charles Wright, is indeed the "imaging of the invisible," to what extent is the poetic word enhanced by the language of cinema?  Award-winning filmmaker Christine Fugate seeks to explore this question and the interpretation of poetry and imagery through her short film Grief Becomes Me. Shot on state-of-the-art digital video, Ms. Fugate's stark, black and white cinematic images enhance the rich visual imagery evoked by Ms. Hilbert's words.

Grief Becomes Me combines Ms. Fugate's extensive film and directorial experience with the poetry genre for the first time.  After directing and producing the indie hit film, The Girl Next Door, and award-winning projects for A&E, The Discovery Channel, PBS, and others, Ms. Fugate left Los Angeles for a break from her film career.  It was after this move that she discovered Donna Hilbert's stirring poetry, and was inspired to create a production company dedicated to making poetry visual.  Poeta Productions was born out of this partnership between poet and filmmaker; Grief Becomes Me is the first in a trilogy of Donna Hilbert's poems to be filmed by the company, with additional collaborations forthcoming.

Donna Hilbert's widely acclaimed work hit the poetry world in 1990, with the release of her first poetry collection entitled Mansions. With language "astonishingly pure and crystalline," her poems examine the complexity of human emotion and relationships (Jonathan Ward). Grief Becomes Me is based on her Transforming Matter collection, written shortly after the tragic death of her husband, "examines faith, grief, the afterlife, and, most poignantly, how to love the ones who are no longer here" (Denise Duhamel). The four poems realized on film stem from the early days following her husband's death. 

Through spoken word and voiceover, Ms. Hilbert conveys her intuitive knowledge of the accident before being told the news, her anger at his passing, and finally her dreams where she reunites with him, mirroring three of the psychological stages of grief: disbelief, anger and eventual acceptance.  The images in Grief Becomes Me match the range of emotion and follow the loose narrative of the poems, portraying her emptiness as well as her fantasies of reuniting with her husband.  The poems elicit striking imagery and rich emotion, an effect made fully explicit when combined with the starkly powerful visuals in the film.

To complement the complexity of Ms. Hilbert's poetic imagery, Ms. Fugate fashioned Grief Becomes Me in a hyper-cinematic style.  Shot overexposed in a wide screen format, the black and white images represent the latest in digital video technology.  Ms. Fugate collaborated with a team of filmmakers, including Emmy-nominated Director of Photography Sandra Chandler, to create a surreal visual sense that evokes the poet's striking imagery of death.  Music has been added over the images and poetry to heighten the emotional effect.  Grief Becomes Me will be projected directly onto white walls, which heightens the grays and blacks in the image.  The overall effect creates voids of empty space as the overexposed image dissolves into the wall.

With so many losses to our country on September 11 and with the subsequent war on terror, Grief Becomes Me, in its moving examination of one woman's loss, offers a timely discussion of death and its aftermath.