~ 2023 ~
Watershed by Tania Haberland
Watershed is a fusion of abstract music video and poetic text. Its maker, Carine Iriarte, calls this electropoetry. As with ambient electronic music, the piece is minimal, with mantric repetition of a fragment of a poem by Tania Haberland, whose spoken voice within the music is lush and lulling to the ear. The images meet the sound in fluid digital layers. The hypnotic experience of the video is like a trance meditation.
The Torrid Zone is another video from these artists featured before at Moving Poems, in that instance from a complete poem by Haberland.
Music and film are credited to Poetics of Reverie, a collaborative project of Iriarte.
Poetry Film in Conversation: Jane Glennie, Rosie Garland and Maria Jastrzębska
The online Poetry Film in Conversation series, hosted by Helen Dewberry, returns on June 8 from 7:30-9:00 PM British Standard Time. Rosie Garland, Maria Jastrzębska and Moving Poems’ own Jane Glennie are her interlocutors, with plans to discuss research, re-imagining and collaboration: “What is the role of the poet? What is the role of the filmmaker? How can we adapt and develop poetry into film?”
Tickets are £6.13 through Eventbrite.
Jane Glennie and Rosie Garland will discuss their collaboration Because Goddess is Never Enough. The work is inspired by dancer Tilly Losch. Maria Jastrzębska will address writing for Snow Q, which re-imagines the Snow Queen story.
Call for work: ekphrastic video poems
Part of Festival Fotogenia in Mexico in November/December 2023 is Frame to Frames: Your Eyes Follow II. This is an ekphrastic video poem screening and prize competition.
Organisers are looking for films under 10 minutes, but preferably around 5 minutes, that are based on paintings or other works of art. Submitted films must include subtitles – in Spanish for films in English, or in English for films in Spanish or other languages.
There is also the option of working with the painting chosen for the festival: Huapango Torero by leading contemporary Mexican artist Ana Segovia (courtesy the artist and Karen Huber Gallery).
For more information and how to enter see: https://liberatedwords.com/2023/05/16/ana-segovia-painting-inspiration-for-frame-to-frames-your-eyes-follow-fotogenia-link-for-entry-forms/ Where you can also read more about the Festival painting and why Liberated Words’ Sarah Tremlett chose it for the competition.
MIX 2023: Storytelling in Immersive Media
The programme is now out for MIX 2023. This year the conference is co-hosted by Bath Spa University and the British Library in London on 7th July 2023. The Library will be the host venue, and will coincide with it’s Digital Storytelling exhibition of digital literature and emerging formats, highlighting digital publishing over recent years.
There are presentations from panellists from wide-ranging disciplines that can provide inspiration for poetry filmmakers and writers, as well as from established poetry filmmakers – including Janet Lees, Sarah Tremlett, Csilla Toldy, and myself. See the full programme, details of the keynote speech, and supporting events: a curator tour of the exhibition with tea, and the evening live performance and sound experience – An Island of Sound.
Weighing In by Rhina Espaillat
An uplifting animation about age, gravity and being human, Weighing In is from a poem by Dominican-American writer Rhina Espaillat. The film was directed by Casey McIntyre for MPC Creative in Los Angeles in partnership with Motionpoems. It was especially designed as a film for children. The poem can be read on the page here.
Call for films: Videobardo International Videopoetry Festival
The Buenos Aires-based Videobardo festival will mark its 27th year this November, and has just issued an open call in Spanish and English.
Videobardo Archive and International Videopoetry Festival, founded in 1996, has been presented in 21 countries and is the oldest active videopoetry Festival in the world. This 2023 opens its call to be part of a new edition of the Festival that will be held in November in Buenos Aires, Argentina, with itinerances to be defined.
We understand Videopoetry to be those audiovisual works in which the poetic verbal language (word, letter, speech, speech, writing, visual or sound sign) has a leading role or special transformative treatment. So that the three fields: Moving Image, Sound and Verbal Language dialogue to create a reality that is the Videopoetic Work.
Here are the terms and conditions. Note that all submissions should be subtitled in Spanish, though “subtitling may be dispensed with long as the artist and VideoBardo consider that it does not affect the understanding of the work.”
Call for entries: Filmetry 23
Filmetry, an online festival of poetry and film that began in 2019 and picked up steam during the pandemic, is inviting filmmakers to make new work from a set selection of poems, just as Moving Poems did with our own upcoming haibun film festival. If our experience is any guide, they may need extra help in getting the word out, so do share this widely:
FILMETRY: a Festival of Poetry and Film is an annual collaborative art-making endeavor that pairs filmmakers with poets to create exciting new pieces of work. Filmmakers are invited to synthesize and adapt poetic work into film with only one rule: a commitment to including the text of the poem, in full, in the finished piece. The hope is that through this collaboration, both artistic partners can witness not just an adaptation of a written piece into audiovisual media, but the transformation of the original piece into something wholly new.
PLEASE READ THE RULES BELOW BEFORE SUBMITTING. The festival invites filmmakers to create new work from specific poems available on our website. Work created from poetry not on this list will be disqualified.
In its 5th year, FILMETRY will invite curated work adapted from poetry engaged with cinema. Visit copy paste this link: filmetry.org/2023-work (password: filmetry2023) to view selected work for adaptation.
They have a very tasty selection of contemporary poems to adapt from the likes of Martha Collins, Sheryl St. Germain, Denise Duhamel, and Gary LaFemina. Click through to FilmFreeway for the complete guidelines.
Сезонът на печалните кентаври / The Season of the Sorrowful Centaurs by Marion Koleva
A poem in the voice of Clio/Kleio, the muse of history, by Bulgarian journalist and poet Marion Koleva in a 2021 film by Vladimir Mihaylov, AKA poe3, supported by funding from the Bulgarian Ministry of Culture. The poem appears in Koleva’s 2014 collection, Спомен за тропик (Memory of Tropic).
Like Копнеж каквото е… / What Craving Is… by Dessislava Nedelcheva, which I shared two weeks ago, this film is part of Mihaylov’s project 10 Short Films of Videopoetry.
Childhood’s End by Howie Good
I LOVE this new videopoem! Belgian artist-composer Marc Neys (aka Swoon) is of course a Moving Poems regular, as is retired journalism professor Howie Good — one of the most productive poets I know. The fit of images to words hits that sweet spot half-way between random and literal, and the font seems chosen for maximum contrast in feeling with the dark content of the text.
The video does double duty as a trailer for Good’s new collection, a chapbook/pamphlet from Laughing Ronin Press called Heart-Shaped Hole.
Foxtrot by Rosemary Norman
A fun text animation by long-time videopoem collaborators Stuart Pound and Rosemary Norman, who appear also to have a new videopoetry collection out, though I haven’t seen it yet.
