Posts By Dave Bonta

Dave Bonta is a poet, editor, and web publisher from the Appalachian mountains of central Pennsylvania.

Call for poetry films: Newlyn Film Festival

A new international film festival slated for April 6-8th, 2018 at the The Centre, Newlyn, Cornwall, UK will include a poetry film section, selected by judges Lucy English and Sarah Tremlett, who should be well known to readers of Moving Poems. The deadline is January 31 February 21, 2018. Here are the guidelines. To see the categories and submission fees for each, click through to Film Freeway and look on the right-hand sidebar. Poetry films can be up to six minutes long, and are “limited to one per applicant.”

The other categories are Fiction Film, Student Film, and Documentary. General advice on eligibility notes that “The Festival is open to short films of all production techniques, including animation, documentary, drama, experimental or artist film and hybrid work from low to high budgets.”

Updated 2 October to correct information about the maximum duration of poetry films.

Poetry film screening season is upon us!

Autumn is here, and with it the annual parade of poetry film festivals and screenings that do so much to expose new audiences to this still obscure hybrid genre. Many of the films shown in these events are yet not available to watch on the web (and some may never be), besides which most films do deserve to be seen on the big screen, so please try to support live events like these. Here’s a rather too brief run-down, including one that just concluded.

September 28-October 1: Festival Silêncio, Lisbon, “Isto Não é um Filme. É Um Poema” (That’s Not a Film. It’s a Poem) competition. Just in, here are the results:

NACIONAL

Prémio Especial do Júri Competição Nacional:
‘Dia’ de Rita Quelhas

Prémio do PÚBLICO NACIONAL:
‘A Montanha’ de Pedro Caldeira

Prémio VENCEDOR NACIONAL
‘Running Man’ de Pedro Sena Nunes

INTERNACIONAL

Vencedor Internacional
‘Spree’ de Martin Kelly & Ian McBryde

Prémio de Público Internacional
‘Vaccine’ de Kate Sweeney

October 7: Juteback Poetry Film Festival Fall Screening, Fort Collins, Colorado (USA). There’s an annotated list of the films on their website.

October 13: My Eyes Like Rays: National Poetry Competition Filmpoem screening & poetry reading, Poetry Cafe, London (UK). “Filmpoem makers James William Norton, Helmie Stil and Sarah Tremlett will screen all ten NPC films.” I’m glad the Poetry Society is still promoting poetry films, and I hope to be able to share some of them when they’re released to the web.

October 15: 5th Ó Bhéal Poetry-Film Competition screening, Cork (Ireland). Click the foregoing link for the shortlist as well as time and place details.

October 21: Rabbit Heart Poetry film Festival, Worcester, Massachusetts (USA). Here are the 2017 shortlists. (That’s right, they have more than one. And if you think some of them are actually rather long, you should see the longlist. This year they received over 350 submissions from 41 countries!) And here’s the trailer.

October 28: Filmpoem Festival 2017, Lewes, East Sussex (UK). A few more details about the event are on Facebook.

October 28: Cinema Poetica, Ashland, Oregon (USA)

November 9-11: Art Visuals & Poetry Film Festival, Vienna (Austria). Click through and use the drop-down menus to peruse the programs for the multiple components of this supremely well-organized event — now the second largest poetry film festival in the world, with 82 films screening over three days. Here’s the trailer.

November 25-26: 6th CYCLOP Poetry Film Festival, Kiev (Ukraine). The submissions period just closed, so I’m guessing it will be a few weeks until the shortlist is released.

Surge by George Szirtes

We are disasters
on the edge of our own shores,
dreaming and woken.

Nothing permanent
about us. If sea can break
so can shore and cliff.

I was delighted to run across this on Vimeo the other day: director Colin Ramsay‘s film for a poem by one of my favorite British poets, George Szirtes. I remembered seeing him post about the filming on Facebook back in August:

Today we film three poems dealing with flood from Mapping the Delta. The poems will be recorded here at lunchtime then we head out to Happisburgh to ascend lighthouses and church towers and possibly to drop dramatically into the sea at an opportune moment of erosion. Where is my Tennysonian cloak when it is needed?

Szirtes also shared the producer’s series of photos from the shoot. Here’s the Vimeo description:

Surge – based on a poem by George Szirtes from his 2016 poetry book Mapping the Delta. Shot on location in Happisburgh, Norfolk, England.

Directed & edited by Colin Ramsay
Produced by James Murray-White
Camera by James Uren
Music – Lost Frontier by Kevin Macleod

Shot on an Ursa 4K mini using Samyang 24mm & 50mm prime lenses, graded in Premiere.

And Death Shall Hall No Dominion (excerpt) by Dylan Thomas

This is Aum Shinrikyo, directed by Noah Conopask. On Vimeo, he describes how he came to make it:

On a recent shoot in Tokyo I was incredibly inspired by Japan and everything I was seeing around me visually. The streets, the people and the fashion. I learned about a doomsday cult called Aum Shinrikyo (Japanese オウム真理教) that let off deadly sarin nerve gas in Tokyo’s subway system 20 years ago. The attack was the worst in modern Japanese history. It made me think of Dylan Thomas poems about life and death. It was something I wanted to bring to life cinematically. I had a vision of a few of the cult members walking around Tokyo. Staking out the attack, the way thieves would a bank heist.

Poem: ‘And Death Shall Hall No Dominion’ Excerpt by Dylan Thomas
Directed by: Noah Conopask
Production Company: The Sweet Shop
Cinematography: Garrett Hardy Davis
Edit: James Dierx at Whitehouse Post
Music: Traces
Voice Over: Vivian
Color: Seth Ricart at RCO
Producer: Larissa Tiffin
Talent: KO3UKE Onishi, Kenji Araki, Percy

When it Comes to Marching by Bertolt Brecht

A brief animation of a poem from Brecht’s A German War Primer by Andrea Malpede AKA Andrea Nocive, who notes in the Vimeo description:

I’ve always found Bertolt Brecht’s words strong and full of love.
In this animation I tried to give life to his powerful concept.

Ao Amigo do Fáscio / To the Fascist’s Friend by Murilo Guimarães

Murilo Guimarães is a Brazilian poet and multimedia artist and a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of Lisbon. Ao Amigo do Fáscio is his first release for RG: Murilo, “an art project situated in an imaginary intersection of ethnography, electronic music, video and literature.”

The poem is a letter to [one who] has been captivated by violently irrational acts and thoughts set by politicians, intellectuals and influencing individuals or groups.

In the video, two proto-fascists walk around the city amidst everyone else without being noticed.

The voiceover is by Terêncio Lins. Be sure to click the CC icon to read the English translation (which is a little rough, but one can get the drift).

In Darwin’s Dream by Matt Mullins

A brand-new collaboration between two seasoned poetry-film pros, Spanish director Eduardo Yagüe and American writer Matt Mullins, who edits the mixed media section of Atticus Review. Although Matt’s own videopoems are often very effective, here he supplied just the text, voiceover and music, and Eduardo did the rest — the same division of labor as in their 2016 film The Hero is Light. The actress here is Rut Ayuso.

Daddy Dearest by Lissa Kiernan

Marc Neys AKA Swoon‘s latest video for a poem by Lissa Kiernan incorporates footage by Grant Porter, Tim Williams and Mikeel Araña. Marc’s original composition features in the soundtrack alongside Lissa’s recitation.

Cathedral by Dave Richardson

My brother lost his virginity behind the barn, he says, but he says a lot of things… sometimes we want to hold on to sanctuaries and cathedrals even as they crumble.

A new, text-on-screen videopoem by artist and writer Dave Richardson, each of whose poetry films so far has been something of a masterpiece. This one has special resonance for me, since I also grew up playing in an old barn with my brothers, and love old barns in general. Cathedral strikes me as a quiet but powerful ode to this most iconic embodiment of rural life.

West of Dalabrog by Susannah Ramsay

Poet and director Susannah Ramsay‘s description reads:

West of Dalabrog refers to the relationship between place, landscape, memory and subjective experience. It focuses on the return to a place of personal importance – a long stretch of white sand to the west of the town of Dalabrog, South Uist, which I first visited in 2001. The return represents a shift in perception and reflects how time can bear great change on a place, landscape and more crucially memory.

Catwalk by Bernard Dewulf

Judith Dekker notes in the Vimeo description that this was the

Last poem Bernard Dewulf wrote as city poet of Antwerp Belgium. Music composed by Doug Keith, an american musician living in NewYork. And the cat was shot (without being hurt) in the town of Dunbar Scotland. Translation courtesy of Vlaams Fonds voor de Letteren.

For those who know Dutch, there’s also a version without subtitles. The version above appears in the latest issue of Poetry Film Live, along with the text, some stills, and a bio of the filmmaker. Check it out. And for more of Dewulf’s work in English, visit Poetry International Web, as well as his page here on Moving Poems.

Restriction Site Poetics by Jason Brennan

A wonderful, too-short animation by Australian artist and former research scientist Nicholas Kallincos. He says on Vimeo that it’s an “Experimental mixed media animation made in collaboration with UK spoke word poet, Jason Brennan in 2005. Soundtrack by Cornel Wilczek”.

It could be my Google-fu just isn’t very good today, but I’m not able to find anything about Brennan online aside from this.