Fragments of Paradise

Intimate portrait of the pioneering filmmaker and poet Jonas Mekas, assembled from thousands of hours of his own footage and diaries.

For over 70 years, Jonas Mekas, “the godfather of avant-garde cinema”, documented his life. From his arrival in New York City as a displaced person in 1949 to his death in 2019, he created thousands of hours of film diaries and unpublished audio recordings to construct a story about finding beauty amidst profound loss, an attempt to make sense of it all…with a camera.

K.D.Davison’s documentary condenses this vast video archive down to a 90-minute primer on his life and includes interviews with Amy Taubin, Peter Bogdanovich, John Waters, Martin Scorsese, as well as Jonas’s children Sebastian and Oona Mekas.