The Poetry Experience: May Those From Under Our Feet

Documentary Synopsis & Origin Story
Featuring Rajnii Eddins | Videography Collaboration by Ryan Boera

Documentary Synopsis

The Poetry Experience: May Those From Under Our Feet is a documentary exploring the transformative power of poetry, storytelling, community, and the spoken word as vessels for healing, connection, self-discovery, and collective liberation.

Centered on The Poetry Experience, a community-centered creative gathering founded and facilitated by poet, teaching artist, and cultural organizer Rajnii Eddins in Burlington, Vermont, the film illuminates the extraordinary possibilities that emerge when people from diverse backgrounds come together to share their truths, honor their lived experiences, and bear witness to one another through the power of language. Through intimate moments of creative expression, reflection, and communal exchange, the documentary celebrates poetry as a living practice of remembrance, belonging, and the reclamation of voice. It honors the stories carried within us, the ancestors whose footsteps have shaped our journeys, and the generations whose voices are still emerging.

The Origin Story: A Creative Partnership

In September 2023, longtime poet, teaching artist, and community organizer Rajnii Eddins joined forces with videographer and visual storyteller Ryan Boera to embark upon a documentary project capturing the spirit, significance, and transformative impact of The Poetry Experience.

Born from a shared appreciation for the power of authentic storytelling and the importance of preserving the often-unseen beauty of community-centered creative spaces, the collaboration sought to illuminate something both intimate and universal: what becomes possible when people are invited to bring their whole selves into a space of compassionate listening, courageous expression, and collective imagination.

For Eddins, whose decades of work have centered on the power of poetry to build bridges across generations, cultures, and lived experiences, the documentary offered an opportunity to preserve and share the living testimony of a community shaped by the spoken and written word.

Together, Eddins and Boera undertook the project with the intention of moving beyond simply documenting a poetry gathering. Their vision was to reveal the humanity, vulnerability, resilience, joy, and extraordinary creative possibility that arise when people are given the space to speak and be heard.

The resulting film, May Those From Under Our Feet, stands as both a celebration of the participants who breathe life into The Poetry Experience and an invitation to audiences everywhere to recognize the sacred and transformative potential of their own stories.

At its heart, the documentary asks us to consider how the voices of those who came before us continue to inform our present, how our stories become gifts to one another, and how the simple act of gathering in community can become an extraordinary act of love, remembrance, and liberation. A Film Rooted in Legacy and Possibility May Those From Under Our Feet is ultimately an affirmation that poetry belongs to everyone. It is not merely an art form reserved for the page or stage, but a living, breathing expression of our shared humanity.

Through this creative collaboration, Eddins and Boera offer a testament to the enduring importance of community storytelling and the profound legacy we create when we honor the voices beneath our feet, beside us, and those yet to come.