David Sander has shown the remarkable ability to analyze both Japanese and Muslim cinema, and to discover hidden connections in the ways they present visions of healing and compassion amidst suffering and loss. Like poetry, films create an alternative to the violence of history through offering images of hope and promise, defying selfishness and death by revealing the potential for new life and meaning.

John C. Lyden, Professor and Chair of Religious Studies, University of Nebraska Omaha, USA, and Editor of the Journal of Religion & Film, and Author of Film as Religion: Myths, Morals, and Rituals (2003)

David Sander's A Poetic History explores the dreamlike liminal space between cinematic imagination and social reality and points to film's ability to disclose core subtleties of human experience. Through a panoramic archive of Japanese, North African, Iranian, and South Asian cinema he reveals how filmmakers manage the trauma of abandonment, the threat of ecological devastation, the dangers of war, and the possibilities of healing and transformation. The innovative intersection of Japanese and Muslim cinema brings an unfamiliar but welcomed pairing to the study of religion and film.

Kristian Petersen, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Old Dominion University, USA, and Editor of Bloomsbury Handbook of Muslims and Popular Culture (2023)

David Sander offers a scholarly journey through the metaphysics of Japanese and sufi cinema. He teases the threads of the subtle knots that bind Buddhism and Islam, revealing a tapestry rich with poetic meaning. The book demonstrates the possibilities of a poetic methodology as a norm of aesthetic exchange, which resists orientalist essentialism and plumbs for our deeper entanglements. A Poetic History will be uniquely valuable to scholars of film, history, and religious studies. It will also be of compelling to anyone who loves films with long uninterrupted shots, featuring those cinematic moments that disrupt secular time.

Syed Adnan Hussain, Associate Professor of Religion, Saint Mary's University, Canada