Summary

Metahaven's 2024 The Feeling Sonnets (Transitional Object) uses essayist and fictionalized motifs and patterns for its imaginative take on a 2022 poetry collection by Eugene Ostashevsky. The film builds on the collective’s earlier moving image work, such as Chaos Theory (2021) and Hometown (2018), investigating joy, absurdism, truth claims, and childhood—now with Ostashevsky’s poetry as its impetus. The Feeling Sonnets (Transitional Object) follows protagonist Amélie Haest in three roles, responding to Ostashevsky’s verse, in which words, sentences, idioms, and poetic conventions are dislodged and defamiliarized across historical backgrounds and mutual (un)translatability.