The Film

Why The Reluctant Visionary?

“We started to advertise ‘The Prophet,’ and its sales slowed up,” so we stopped. It must be a cult, but I have never met any of its members. I haven’t met five people who ever read Gibran”…  I “never understood” him. Publisher Alfred A. Knopf As a struggling bilingual artist in the turn of the 20th century New York City, Lebanese American Poet and Artist, Kahlil Gibran pens what has now become the third most read book in modern history, The Prophet.  The more that has been written about Gibran the more elusive the man himself has tended to become as critics, friends, and biographers have built up a variety of unconnected pictures.

To answer the question “who was Kahlil Gibran and why is he still relevant? Our film through the tireless efforts of Gibran research-historian, Glen Kalem asks some of our most significant minds and global figures, who at stages in their own life used Gibran’s poetry and mentorship to achieve their own life’s purpose. If the poet as he wrote is ” a link between this and the coming world” … a pure spring from which all thirsty souls may drink” our quest in tracing his readership we hope to find hints of Gibran’s poetic vision of a united universal-world at work, as either a myth or as a “coming of the ages” prediction. Who was Gibran is our quest, finding the answer is going to take some spirited effort and a camera. Join us.