Call for entries: Cadence Video Poetry Festival

Cadence Video Poetry Festival - Northwest Film Forum banner

Chelsea Werner-Jatzke recently contacted me to let us know about a videopoetry festival that she’s helping to organize in Seattle, and due to a snafu in communications, I’m a little late in getting this news out. But there’s still time: the deadline for submissions is March 1. Chelsea wrote:

Verse meets visuals in motion at Northwest Film Forum (NWFF) in April 2019. Cadence: Video Poetry Festival, presented by NWFF, programmed in collaboration with Seattle author Chelsea Werner-Jatzke, is a series of screenings, workshops, and discussions on the genre of video poetry, throughout National Poetry Month. Entering its second year, Cadence is growing considerably to fill a gap in the presentation of video poetry in the Pacific Northwest. Featuring four screenings, one each Thursday of the month, the festival’s inaugural Artist in Residence, generative workshops for youth and adults, and a juried selection of open submissions, Cadence fosters critical and creative growth around the oft overlooked medium of video poetry.

Cadence approaches video poetry as a literary genre presented as visual media that makes new meaning from the combination of text and moving image.

The website adds:

Video poetry is language as light. As an art form, video poetry is lucid and liminal—on the threshold of the literary and the moving image. It articulates the poetic image visually, rather than metaphorically—it shifts words from page to screen, from ink to light. A video poem makes meaning that would not exist if text was without image, image without text. It is language-based video work or a video-based poem. Video poetry is a literary genre presented as visual media.

Which is a damn good definition, I thought.

Cadence Call for Entries

NWFF is accepting video poetry submissions for inclusion in the April 18, 2019 screening of Cadence Video Poetry Festival. We are looking for works no longer than 5 minutes that fit within the following categories of video poetry:

  • Adaptations/Ekphrasis: Videos created to bring new meaning and dimension to pre-existing poetry. Any poems used for this purpose must be in the public domain or else used with written consent of the author.
  • Collaboration: Video poems created in collaboration between a videographer or video artist and poet.
  • Video by Poets: Poets creating video from, or as, their writing.
  • Poetry by Video Artists: Video artists using text visually or through audio intrinsic to the poetic meaning.

Cadence Video Poetry Festival proudly accepts entries via FilmFreeway.
Submission deadline: March 1

Please direct questions regarding submissions to NWFF Artistic Director Rana San at rana@nwfilmforum.org.

The screening of selections from this open call for entries on April 18 is just one of four Cadence screenings, and the two workshops also sound very worthwhile, one on April 6th, and another on April 13 for teenagers. See the website for details about all those events.

This is actually the festival’s second year. In 2018 there was a call (which I missed) for entries from filmmakers in the northwest region.

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