Eric, Winter to Spring
2015 · 15m · United States
Directed by Danya Abt, Joyce Wong
Genres: biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
A character study of Eric Martine, a Brooklyn cab driver who quit drugs after his brother's death and now re-maps his life onto the city by turning his experiences into prose poetry, observed across one season as he roams the streets at night, gets a tattoo, and works on his writing.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A doc about a cab driver writing poetry sounds like exactly the kind of earnest Brooklyn grief-memoir everyone else would greenlight—except Abt and Wong's choice to let his prose poems *be* the interpretation of his own life, rather than narration explaining it, flips the whole thing into something genuinely strange and self-aware.
The film's structural intelligence—using Eric's own textual meditation as the frame through which we see his nocturnal roaming—places it within a lineage of essayistic documentary that values the subject's voice as formal architecture, reminiscent of work from the Mekas and Marker tradition.
The decision to privilege Eric's prose poetry as the primary lens means every edit, every street shot, every quiet moment in the cab becomes a visual gloss on language itself—it's a modest budget that refuses exposition and trusts instead that the viewer can hold both the image and the poem in mind at once, and that restraint is what makes it work.
Reviews
effectively shows that while the past will always be with us, it should not stifle us from attempting to change the course of our future one step at a time.
Festivals
- Brooklyn Film Festival 2015, Best Short Documentary