Elisabeth Bishop: From Brazil with Love explores the transformative period when American poet Elisabeth Bishop lived in Brazil (1950s–1970s). Highlighting her profound relationship with Brazilian architect Lota de Macedo Soares, the film weaves letters, poems and archival footage to reveal Brazil’s deep influence on Bishop’s personal life and artistic journey.

Rather than following a biographical chronology, Elisabeth Bishop: From Brazil with Love offers viewers an immersive composition that reflects Bishop’s poetic sensibility and her fragmented explorations of identity, love and belonging. Refusing conventional documentary forms, the film captures Bishop’s spirit through the materials she left behind, adopting a layered, introspective approach. Visual and sonic fragments contribute to a wider fabric of memory and emotion, placing the viewer inside Bishop’s experience as a foreigner in Brazil. Her recorded voice, intimate and often ironic correspondence with contemporaries such as Robert Lowell and Alfred Kazin, and archival images of Brazil in the 1950s and 1960s testify to the nuances of her life in the country and the impact it had on her art. The Vassar College Special Collections generously granted access to poetry drafts, notes, letters, watercolours and photographs, allowing an authentic, material portrait of a woman whose life and work continue to resonate. The film is also a tribute to Brazil—the country where Ostrovsky grew up and a place that deeply shaped Bishop, becoming a source for some of her most intense, introspective poems. Elisabeth Bishop: From Brazil with Love is a visual ode to the legacies of a poet and a place, each enduringly and intimately transformed by the other. Vivian Ostrovsky and Ruti Gadish.