Posts By Dave Bonta
waxing gibbous 97% illuminated by Yolanda Movsessian
This film by Mitchell Collins, with poetry and recitation by Houston-based poet Yolanda Movsessian, won the Judge’s Prize at REELpoetry Houston 2022.
Utility Pole by Fiona Tinwei Lam and Mary McDonald
A very effective collaboration between two Canadian poetry filmmakers, Mary McDonald and Vancouver poetry laureate Fiona Tinwei Lam. Here’s the description from Vimeo:
Utility Pole is a poetry film collaboration between poet Fiona Tinwei Lam and poetry filmmaker Mary McDonald. Utility Pole explores the transformation of trees into the poles that hold our communications, the many branched network that connect us, as the trees have been severed from each other and their own living networks.
The soundscape is a binaural, 360 soundscape featuring a mix of urban forest sounds, with the sounds of technology today and the pointed call of Morse code, our earliest technologically enabled transatlantic communication. Morse code recording is from Freesound.org credits, Bryce835.
This was featured at the indispensable Poetry Film Live site. Go there to read the poet-filmmakers’ bios. As they note, the text of the poem appears in Tinwei Lam’s third collection, Odes & Laments.
Bullets by Brayden
For World Poetry Day, here’s an Ohio preschooler’s poem animated by Ukrainian artist Stas Santimov. It’s from a project called Preschool Poets:
Old snakes, loose teeth, hot tubs, and ugly people in your face.
This is the world when you are four.For nearly a decade, resident artist Nancy Kangas led a poetry program for preschool-aged children at Columbus Early Learning Centers on the near east side of Columbus. She was struck with how clearly her kids wrote about what they loved and feared. They want bullets to relax, lions to roar, and kids to climb up to the sun.
Nancy and documentary filmmaker Josh Kun asked award-winning international artists to animate these poems, and the resulting hand-crafted animations show a depth and complexity of expression we don’t expect from four-year olds. The films are fueled by the children’s untethered imaginations, but they open a portal to the real world of growing up in the inner city.
Thanks to Maria Popova for highlighting this. You can read the text of the poem there, or at the project site.
Call for work: Living With Buildings festival
A festival of films exploring how people interacts with buildings and urban spaces in the public realm. We aim to screen short films/poetry film that investigates how we experience the build environment.
[LIVING WITH BUILDINGS is brought to you by the Disappear Here poetry film project]
We’re looking for work up to 5 mins in length, anything between the poetry-film, experimental, short-documentary strands of film-making. The project is rooted in the UK city of Coventry, famed for its ringroad, modernist architecture and reinvention as a city rising from the ashes and ruins of arial bombing in World War Two – we are happy to consider work from citizens all around the world.
The psychopathology of underpass and overground.
Floating towers holding up the sky.
Living With Buildings.
Finding our way(s) through the subterranean culture and dead roads with no ending.
Exploring internal tensions between regeneration and gentrification.Remaking and remodelling urban spaces as forces of commerce or gentle revolution take hold and fight for ownership.
Where does the citizen fit into these processes; and how do we interpret or express their experiences of the ground shifting beneath their feet.
Find out more about the Disappear Here project – http://www.disappear-here.org
VENUE
LTB SHOWROOMS (above the Litten Tree pub) – COVENTRY – CV1 1EX – 1 Warwick Road
Rules & Terms
Reconnections: free online screening of poetry films at Lyra Bristol Poetry Festival
Pleased to see this:
Date: Saturday 17th April 2021
Price: Free
Time: 12:00 – 1:00pmA screening of poetry films on the theme of Reconnection, curated by Liberated Words. Reconnection to landscape, the body, our history, family and heritage, during and before the pandemic. Artists featured include Kat Lyons, Edalia Day, Rebecca Tantony, Alice Humphreys, Liv Torc, Yvonne Reddick, Helmie Stil, Helen Johnson, Sarah Tremlett, Sarah Wimbush, Isobel Turner, Edson Burton, Michael Jenkins, Pierluigi Muscolino and Francesco Garbo. Followed by a discussion and Q&A with Sarah Tremlett and Lucy English of Liberated Words.
In registering for the event, I found that I had to use a UK postcode — your mileage may vary. Get your free ticket here.
Submissions open through May 31 for Weimar Poetry Film Award 2021
It looks as if I might’ve neglected to post the original call-out for the 6th Weimar Poetry Film Award. It’s here, but I’ll paste it in below as well:
Through the Weimar Poetry Film Award the Literary Society of Thuringia and the Weimar Animation Club are looking for innovative poetry films. Filmmakers from any nation and of any age are welcome to participate with up to three short films of up to 10:00 mins, which explore the relation between film and written poetry in an innovative, straightforward way. Films that are produced before 2018 will not be considered.
The competition »Weimar Poetry Film Award« is financed by Kulturstiftung des Freistaats Thüringen and the City of Weimar. The competition is part of the »International Poetry Film Festival of Thuringia«.
From all submitted films selected for the festival competition three Jury members will choose the winner of the main awards (Best Animation, 1200 €; Best Video, 1200 €). Moreover, an audience award of 250 € will be awarded.
Dates & Deadlines
- November 1, 2020 – Opening Date
- December 31, 2020 – Earlybird
- May 31, 2021 – Regular Deadline
- July 16, 2021 – Notification Date
- September 25, 2021 – Award Ceremony
Form for submissions [pdf] by e-mail to info [at] poetryfilm.de
Cadence: Video Poetry Festival 2021 debuts online on April 16
Tickets to the fourth annual Cadence: Video Poetry Festival are now available and the festival starts on Friday, April 16 and runs through Sunday, April 25. All tickets are sliding scale and all screenings will be available throughout the 10-day festival.
Cadence: Video Poetry Festival, presented by Northwest Film Forum, programmed in collaboration with Seattle author Chelsea Werner-Jatzke and artist Rana San, is a series of screenings, workshops, and discussions on the genre of video poetry, during National Poetry Month.
Cadence approaches video poetry as a literary genre presented as visual media that makes new meaning from the combination of text and moving image. Featuring screenings, an artist residency, generative workshops for youth and adults, and juried awards, the festival fosters critical and creative growth around the medium of video poetry.
“One thing that really impressed us about the submissions pool,” Chelsea and Rana told me in an email, “was how many of the video poems were made in the last year—it’s so impressive and encouraging to see artists creating amid the complicated tumult of our time.”
Festival Highlights
The Uncanny Intermingling showcase will feature a collaborative video poem by participants in the festival workshop, Animated Poetry with Neely Goniodsky, set to Anastacia-Reneé’s poetry currently featured in the exhibition, Anastacia-Reneé: (Don’t Be Absurd) Alice in Parts through April 25 at the Frye Art Museum.
Natachi Mez, NWFF’s 2020 Cadence Artist-in-Residence, completed her residency virtually in 2021 and the resulting video poem will be featured in (and provides the titular line of) the This Is How I Excavate showcase.
Award winners have been selected by guest judges: Nico Vassilakis (Adaptations/Ekphrasis), Caryn Cline (Collaboration), Catherine Bresner (Video by Poets), and Roland Dahwen (Poetry by Video Artists), and Moss Literary Journal (Northwest Artist Award). Submissions in the Wild Card category are judged by Festival Co-Directors Chelsea Werner-Jatzke and Rana San.
Festival Program
Included in Festival Passes:
- The Republics: feature film
- Foam to Form: video poetry showcase
- Housed But Never Homed: video poetry showcase
- Ink of the Unfamiliar Pen: video poetry showcase
- This Is How I Excavate: video poetry showcase
- Uncanny Intermingling: video poetry showcase
Separate registration:
- Cinema Divina: contemplative practice with Marilyn Freeman
- Haiku You: all-ages film poetry workshop with Echo Park Film Center
Scratching at the Surface of Tears by Jill Munro
Filmmaker Karen Dennison writes in a blog post,
As part of Abegail Morley’s series of posts on The Poetry Shed on the theme of Unlocking Creativity, I compiled a film as a prompt with a call out to poets to respond. Jill Munro wrote a fantastic poem in response and here is the resulting film poem.
Click through for the text of the poem and a short biog of Munro.
Call for entries: 2021 Film and Video Poetry Symposium
The L.A.-based Film and Video Poetry Society’s 4th annual symposium is open for submissions from “Poets, Writers, filmmakers, animators, video and digital artists, media and performance artists.”
The symposium celebrates and will screen a large scope of film and video projects developed primarily through the medium of poetry. FVPS2021 will host a series of panels, guest speakers, workshops, and public dialogues regarding film and video poetry throughout the course of the symposium. In addition to the screenings programmers also curate a 30-day gallery exhibition.
There are no restrictions regarding total running time of films submitted. There are no restrictions regarding when the film was produced or if the film has premiered regionally or internationally. There are no restrictions on subject matter, theme, topic, or language of origin.
The Film and Video Poetry Symposium calls for poetry films, filmpoems, digital-poetry, poetry video, Cin(E)-Poetry, spoken word films, videopoema, visual poetry, choreopoems, poetrinca, media poetry, and all films and video that are driven by onscreen text.
The Film and Video Poetry Symposium also excepts and supports experimental film and video work that explores language and/or literature whether it be oral, written, visual, or symbolic. This includes non-narrative work and the avant-guard. We strongly consider work that challenges traditional and current visual communication methods while continuing to function as a mode for exploring narrative forms and personal expression.
The Film and Video Poetry Symposium also calls for essay film, works of epistolary cinema, animation, choreopoems, performance art film and video, episodic content, oratorical works, documentary, video art, media art and installation, works created through immersive technologies, and episodic programming. Please see categories below for more details.
The deadline is September 4 and the submission fee is $20 per film, video, or media project. Click through for descriptions of each category and additional vital details, as well as the submission form and payment button.
