"Piri Thomas?" My friend declared as he perused my DVD collection. "You have a film about Piri Thomas? I can't believe it. He was my hero. No. He saved my life. Really. If I hadn't read "Down These Mean Streets" when I was a kid, I'd still be livin' in the projects, still be hustling, still be I dunno . . .."

My friend's story is not unique. As an Hispanic male of color, he had few role models as a youngster. In Piri Thomas' work, he could see himself and the man he could become. Today he's a trial lawyer, a pillar of respectability, but it's quite possible his fate would have been entirely different without Piri Thomas. Piri Thomas saved many kids' lives after the publication of his autobiographical novel in 1967; he's still saving kids' lives.

Jonathan Robinson, center, confers with one of his DP's, Patrick Rousseau, and Piri Thomas, left, on the set of EVERY CHILD IS BORN A POET. Photo courtesy of Jonathan Robinson.

The film my friend found is EVERY CHILD IS BORN A POET, an artful homage to Piri Thomas by New Haven resident Jonathan Robinson, a man who also feels like Piri saved his life. "I read "Down These Mean Streets" in English class in 1972. I lived in New York City; I was surrounded by kids like these. I wasn't one of them, but now I could know them, really know them."

But the film was not born in 1972. Jon grew up, left New York and went away to study history at the University of California at Berkeley. From there he went on to graduate school at the California Arts Institute where he studied art and film; while there, he made a documentary about his travels in India and Nepal called SIGHT UNSEEN, and he was hooked on filmmaking as a way of telling stories, exploring themes, merging all the arts into one multiply effective medium that can make a definitively interdisciplinary statement.

When he left Cal Arts, Jon took a job in San Francisco where he worked to reintegrate inmates of the San Francisco jails back into society. Piri Thomas often worked with the same populations, but what brought the two together was a reading Thomas did in the Tenderloin.

"He blew me a away. His reading was so musical, so true. I went over to say hello and shook hands with Piri. We talked for a while, and he invited me to a salon he was having at his house. After that, we began hanging out regularly. We clicked."

About that time, Thomas was looking for someone to document his poetry. "So much of what Piri was writing was spoken word, performance art. And it was all stuff I was so interested in, concerned with, passionate about," says Jonathan. "The issue of imprisonment is so important to his work - literal imprisonment and figurative - and I knew what kind of an impact the book had had on me so I knew that the larger body of his work would have an incalculable effect if it could be documented accurately."

Robinson saw an opportunity to create a work with a maximum potential to make that impact in film. "I realized film could put the poetry into the context of his life, could be combined with his plays and his short stories and, through a combination of styles and techniques, could make a film collage of the man's work." Robinson asked Thomas to collaborate on the script, and the two solidified their bond. "An amazing thing happened in the editing process," says the filmmaker. "I saw that Piri resonated with so much I was entirely familiar with. Piri reminded me of my grandfather, and I was able to recognize the huge commonality of the Puerto Rican and Jewish experience and influence on the culture of New York. It was so natural."

Like Thomas' family, Jonathan Robinson's were poor immigrants. His own great grandparents entered New York through Ellis Island from Eastern Europe with the first wave of immigration in the late 1800's, and also like Thomas, Robinson has deep roots in Harlem.

Jonathan Robinson and DP Adam Brickman shoot Piri Thomas on the set of Robinson's film EVERY CHILD IS BORN A POET, the story of the life and work of novelist, poet, playwright, humanitarian Piri Thomas. Photo courtesy of Jonathan Robinson.

His grandmother taught at Harlem's Roosevelt High School, and his grandmother was raised there before moving after marriage to the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. Piri Thomas, who is wont to say, "Olé Olé Olé Oy Vay," spent much of his life married to Betty Elder, a Jewish civil rights attorney, who died in 1986.

Working together, Robinson and Thomas discovered that they had more in common than they had differences. For Robinson, the opportunity to see Piri from so many different perspectives was a great gift. For Thomas' work, the project is panoply of showcases, which employs a variety of approaches to getting inside the work.

Throughout much of the film, Piri Thomas predominates, reading, reciting, and preaching to his audiences of youngsters and prisoners. He has devoted much of his life to educational outreach, helping low-income city dwellers and prison inmates to find their way into a comfort zone in society. Robinson's film delves deeper and deeper into the richness and diversity of the work. Employing comedy, drama, collage/experimental film techniques, music and documentary filmmaking, Robinson illustrates Thomas' life's work and gives it a visual immortality.

An original soundtrack by Kip Hanrahan, featuring Afro/Cuban musicians and Thomas' poetry and original artwork by Juan Sanchez are two of the key elements in this film that is a compilation of all Robinson's favorite role models from Truffaut to Tarkovsky to Fellini. The film is shot by several cinematographers, is stylized and shot on different film stocks and can appeal to a diverse audience.

Most of all, the film reflects Piri Thomas' broad appeal. His work, says Robinson, "is a unifier. It is his mission to open the eyes of the world to different realities that have equal importance to the different peoples of the world."

The film, which was a finalist at the International Documentary Filmfestival, Amsterdam, (IDFA) and for an International Documentary Association (IDA) award, has garnered a number of other prizes, is being self-distributed (visit www.everychildisbornapoet.com). While many suggest that it has the look and the feel of a feature, the film's one-hour length has discouraged distributors from releasing it theatrically.

Robinson is sure, however, that the film is an opportunity to bring Piri Thomas into the lives of thousands of youngsters and adults whose lives can be changed as Robinson's was, perhaps even saved, as my attorney friend's was.

Carla Stockton is an independent film writer producer, a partner in Bagel Fish Productions, and Associate Publisher of Imagine for SW Connecticut.