Bukowski: Born into This

Director: John Dullaghan

Institute History

  • 2003 Sundance Film Festival

Description

The name Bukowski is as synonymous with fighting and f--king as it is with poetry and prose. Charles Bukowski was one of those rare writers whose work succeeded in creating a mythos of epic proportions around its creator. He came to personify the downest and dirtiest of human existence. In a direct, clean style, he wrote about unthinkable, but very real, degradation based on his own personal, hellacious experiences.

Best known for Notes of a Dirty Old Man, Love Is a Dog from Hell, and the autobiographical novels, Women, Hollywood, and Post Office, as well as the screenplay for Barfly, Bukowski is considered one of the most influential authors of his generation. His language is simple, powerful, and often graphic. With exceptional insight and skill, he tears away the mask from conventional civilized life to reveal a raw, tragic, sometimes humorous, but often unsettling reality.

Bukowski: Born into This brilliantly manages to do this same thing to the man. Utilizing an amazing array of interviews to reveal Bukowski in his own words and as seen by the people who knew him best, the film peels off the hardened mask of the beast to reveal the insecure, loving, and extremely human man underneath.

— Trevor Groth

Screening Details

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