Hamline hosted a special screening of the film “From There to There: Bruce Ario, The Minneapolis Poet,” highlighting and honoring late local poet, Bruce Ario, on Friday, Oct. 17 in Giddens Learning Center. In attendance were the directors, Alex Sheremet and Joel Parrish.

Organized by English and Communication Studies professor Suda Ishida, the event began with an introduction from the filmmakers.

“The film was born out of necessity because Bruce Ario, he died in 2022, and this was an unexpected event, and we figured the only way to really get, you know, eyes in his poetry, his work, is to make a film about it,” Sheremet said at the start.

The documentary delves into Ario’s life, showing struggles he faced, including schizophrenia, a traumatic brain injury, substance abuse, incarceration and homelessness. However, it is about much more than that. It shows how writing was a means for him to deal with these hardships and explore his life. Poems of his are read aloud, mainly in his own style called “The Ario.”

Ishida was drawn to screening the film because it highlighted different social issues and wanted to support independent filmmakers.

“I feel Hamline’s very passionate about supporting people with different issues, right? So I thought, why not? We can be that first university to help promote this issue and then help these folks as well,” Ishida said.

After watching, Sheremet and Parrish answered questions, discussing Ario’s legacy and the filmmaking process. Neither knew Ario personally, but knew of his poetry. After his death, they decided to make this film. Both have backgrounds in writing, but were new to filmmaking.

“When Bruce died unexpectedly in 2022, I had the thought to do the movie. I was not a photographer. I was not a videographer, but Joel was. I knew that Joel did photography and I figured if he would agree to do the movie with me, I could actually do it,” Sheremet said.

The film was largely shot in Minneapolis, Ario’s hometown. The filmmakers, who are not from the Twin Cities, first came to Minneapolis to capture footage of the city, particularly with Minnehaha Falls in mind.

“We knew Minnehaha Falls would be critical because of the appearance of his grandmother as a vision to him there, because of its poetic potential beyond that too, right? It’s just a beautiful waterfall in the middle of you know, like, a city,’” Parrish said.

One difficulty of making this film was that Ario is not alive to speak with the filmmakers. However, they were able to uncover a thirty minute interview of Ario in 2021 from his church.

“That was so precious to us, that thirty minutes, because there was obviously enough there for us to use Bruce as we did,” Parrish said.

This meant outside of interviews with other sources, a script was necessary to create this film.

“We’re like ‘alright, we’re gonna have a script there. We don’t have Bruce to ask questions, but we could supply objective facts through a voiceover,’” Sheremet said.

Afterward, attendees were able to get free copies of two books of Ario’s work: his prose novel, “Cityboy”, and “The Minneapolis Poet”, a collection of poems. Attendee and first-year Zakiah Ismail left the event pleasantly surprised.

“I came expecting like, oh, a little documentary, but it was actually really good. A lot of moments captivated me and it was really well thought out. I could tell the capture, like the shots matched what they were saying and I could see that they worked hard in capturing different sources,” Ismail said.

While this film has screened at multiple Twin Cities mental health organizations, Hamline is the first college to screen it. Sheremet does not want it to be the last.

“I like students, I want to talk to students, like, kids are essentially those that should be seeing a movie like this, you know, I feel like almost more than anybody,” Sheremet said.

Ario wrote thousands of poems, but never had a large audience during his lifetime, nor did he make a profit from writing. Parrish hopes that with this film, his work will be able to reach more people.

“He didn’t really have much of one during his life. It was very very small. He never made any you know, any headway, any money off of his writing, anything like that, so it’s just an effort to, over time, hopefully have him gain a bit larger of an audience, really,” Parrish said.