In celebration of his 100th birthday, we preset this intimate portrait of poet Robert Bly who stands out even among the celebrated, revolutionary generation of American artists who burst forth in the 1950s.

ROBERT BLY: A THOUSAND YEARS OF JOY charts Bly’s singular path as a farmer’s son on a wintry Minnesota farm to a radical anti-Vietnam War activist to a wild man of the 1990’s men’s movement. The bespectacled, white-haired Bly is every inch the politically and spiritually engaged mystic, seeking each moment’s fervid heart as well as the eternal, intuitive bedrock beneath our cultivated ideologies and “personas.”

Poet Jane Hirshfield says, “Robert Bly, as few other poets have done, has changed the world for all who now share it.” Bly’s prolific output has nourished the American cultural landscape for over half a century and influenced countless generations of writers and thinkers.

Director: Haydn Reiss  (US 2015) 81 min.