Posts By Dave Bonta
I See My World Shaking by Yuyutsu Sharma
This 2021 documentary poem by UK-based director Stephan Bookas uses a text from Nepalese-Indian poet Yuyutsu Sharma to portray the horror and aftermath of the 2015 earthquake with an intensity that would be hard to mimic in a standard narrative short.
Sharma is the first Nepalese poet we’ve featured on Wikipedia, and he has a fascinating background. Wikipedia notes that
In 2016 he published Quaking Cantos, a collection inspired by the 2015 Nepal earthquakes featuring Sharma’s poetry and photographs by Prasant Shrestha. In the Kathmandu Tribune, Arun Budhathoki wrote that it “immortalized the tragic event and captured the bitter memories of the Himalayan on a grand scale”. Andrea Dawn Bryant called it “stunningly heart-wrenching, albeit healing”.
a beach scene from ostend by Mola Clay
Mola Clay is the creative duo of film-maker and musician Yannick Mosimann, and vocalist and lyricist Selina Brenner, both in Switzerland. This recent video from them contains a deeply touching, poetic reverie, spoken by Brenner. Mosimann’s flickering images are ghostly, suggesting forgotten memories. The voice is calming in its subdued softness, in a soundtrack with silences, where intimacy is felt.
Mosimann’s brilliant earlier film Mrs. Bovary de Porrentruy was a couple of weeks ago awarded the international prize at Zebra Poetry Film Festival in Germany. His film-maker’s voice in both films is distinct and affecting.
From Selina Brenner’s bio…
Selinas work is transdisciplinary and interweaves art forms like music, dance, performance art and visual arts using the body, words/poetry, field recordings, song elements paired with extended vocal techniques and live electronics. Works are inspired by human behavior and perception, nighttime and feeling home, handled in a raw and expressive matter… Selina grew up in Maryland (USA) before moving to Switzerland when she was 12 years old. Selina has been living and working in Berne since 2016. (source)
Upcoming poetry film festival programs now online: Vienna, Midwest, Zebra
Autumn is a busy time in the poetry film world, especially when the biannual Vienna Poetry Film Festival, AKA Art Visuals & Poetry Filmfestival, is happening. It’ll be held on November 14-17 this year. Here’s the full program.
Highlights of this 10th anniversary edition of the festival include a poetry film competition based on the festival poem “la luna” by Viennese poet Manfred Chobot, with seven selections from around the world, and of course the main competition program, which is split into two sessions: one for Austrian films, and the other for German-language films from Germany and Switzerland.
A few days after that program appeared online, the Midwest Poetry Video Fest organizers uploaded detailed programs for their two-day event in Wisconsin, USA:
There will be two evenings of live Poet + Filmmaker performance followed by film screenings on October 14th and October 15th at ALL in Madison, WI and at Woodland Pattern in Milwaukee, WI. Each evening’s screening will be unique and will include a selection of works from the open call alongside works by artists especially invited by the Curatorial Team.
Each date links to a program, including thumbnails and a description of each of the 29 videopoems.
And then today the big dog, Berlin’s ZEBRA festival, announced its program. The English-language version is here, using what looks to be a repurposed URL from 2022. Each time it has a different national focus, and in 2023 that’s going to be Italy:
With selected poetry films from this year’s submissions, as well as the best Italian films of the past years, ZEBRA will present various facets of Italy film and poetry scene. Landscape, love, culture, tradition, and conflict are just a few of the themes. Films in this program are based on poems by Dante Alighieri, Gioacchino Belli, Elena Chiesa, John Giorno, Giacomo Leopardi, Milena Tipaldo oder Lello Voce.
For the international competition, they note that
About 1,200 entries from over 90 countries were submitted to 2023’s ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival. A program committee nominated 25 of them for the international competition.
The three-member international jury will award the following prizes this year: the “ZEBRA Prize for the Best Poetry Film,” donated by the House of Poetry, the “Goethe Film Prize – Borders,” donated by the Goethe-Institut, and the “Ritter Sport Film Prize,” donated by Alfred Ritter GmbH & Co KG.
There are also four thematically grouped programs, or prisms as they call them: The Worlds inside your mind – MEMORIES & DREAMS; All the What-Ifs – ECO POETRY & DYSTOPIA; Urbanities – CITY & SOCIETY; and How to connect – LOVE & BODIES. A couple of readings, a masterclass on animation, and the awards ceremony round out what looks like a very full and exciting program.
If any Moving Poems readers are planning to attend these events, we’d love to hear they went. Feel free to send in any reports or observations you may have.
Careful What You Wish For Orangutan by Pete Mullineaux
Pete Mullineaux won the 2023 Poetry & Folk In The Environment competition sponsored by UK performance-poetry organization Home Stage with this highly entertaining video, a collaboration with Roj Whelan AKA The RoJ LiGht of RoJnRoll Productions in Dublin, who handled the camerawork and editing.
Only by Rebecca Foust
A poetry film by interdisciplinary artist Maxine Flasher-Düzgüneş based on the title poem of Rebecca Foust‘s seventh book, Only (Four Way Books, 2022). Kevin Martinez was the videographer. It was shot at Limantour Beach, California in April 2023.
The publisher’s description does make the book sound intriguing:
Urgent from the outset, Rebecca Foust’s ONLY insists that the only thing worth writing about is everything. Prompted to confront what she does not know, the speaker lists, “Null. All. What’s after death or before.” This book scales the cliff-face of adulthood, that paradoxical ascent in which the longer we live the less we know of life, in which we find that each of us is only ourselves and yet delicately interconnected with everyone, everything, else. These candid lyrics ponder our broken political systems, family (dys)function and parenting challenges, divergent and intersecting identities, the complexities of sexuality and gender, natural refuge and climate catastrophe, and in general what it means to be human in a world that sometimes feels as if it is approaching apocalypse. At the ledge of this abyss, however, Foust reminds us of the staggering beauty of life, the legacies of survival in the echoes of care that outlast us: “I came / to the canyon rim and saw // how best to carry you: I let the stone go.”
Poetry Film in Conversation: Janet Lees, Lee Campbell and Kathy Gee
This coming Thursday, 14th September at 19:30 BST/14:30 EDT, join Helen Dewbery on Zoom via Eventbrite for the latest installment of the series Poetry Film in Conversation from Poetry Film Live, with support from the Lyra Bristol Poetry Festival. This time she’ll be talking with three poets who make their own poetry films: Kathy Gee, Lee Campbell and Janet Lees, asking about their processes and raising the question “Why make a poetry film?”
Janet Lees is a lens-based artist and poet. Her films have been selected for many festivals and prizes, including the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival, the International Videopoetry Festival and the Aesthetica Art Prize. In 2021 she won the Ó Bhéal International Poetry-Film Competition, and in 2022 her work featured in the landmark exhibition Poets with a Video Camera: Poetry Film 1980 to 2020. Janet’s poetry and art photography have been widely published and exhibited.
Kathy Gee studied history and archaeology, worked as a museum curator, established and directed a regional government agency, ran an independent museum consultancy and retrained as a leadership coach. She is now a poet. Checkout (2019) and Book of Bones (2016) were both published by V. Press. She has been shortlisted in the Ó Bhéal International Poetry-Film Competition.
Dr Lee Campbell’s poetry films have been selected for many international film festivals since 2019. His film SEE ME: A Walk Through London’s Gay Soho 1994 and 2020 (2021) won Best Experimental Film at Ealing Film Festival, London 2022 and shortlisted for Out-Spoken Prize for Poetry 2023 at the Southbank Centre, London in 2023. Insta and Twitter @leejjcampbell
link
Caterpillar Suit by Lina Ramona Vitkauskas
A 2020 videopoem by Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, not shared here till now due to an almost criminal oversight, considering how good it is. In 2021 it was a finalist at the 9th International Video Poetry Festival in Greece and the International Migration & Environmental Film Festival in Canada. Vitkauskas notes that it was
Inspired by Latvian artist, Elina Krima + sculpture artist Walter Oltmann.
First cinepoem of 2020 explores what it means to wear the suits of natural instinct, moving through familial separations (especially in light of children being cruelly separated from parents in US). This is perhaps the tip of fear we collectively recycle for the coming decade.
We’ve shared some of her other work over the years, but do explore Vitkausas’s Vimeo page for much more.
Witte Vlag/White Flag by Pat van Boeckel and Pieter van de Pol with Peter Verhelst
Belgian poet Peter Verhelst is the author of the four lines of poetry recited in the film, but I had to include the filmmakers in the title as well because their symbolic, Tarkovsky-influenced style is at least as central to the poetry of the film. Pat van Boeckel is a regular at Moving Poems, and many of his best films spring from other artists’ projects or exhibitions, as this one did. His fellow Dutch artist Pieter van de Pol, who’s the actor in the film, I think, is involved in something called the White Flag Art Project based in Essen, Germany and coordinated by artist Katharina Lökenhoff: “An international art project exploring the white flag meeting global contemporary challenges.” Peter Broderick composed the music.
As an older white male poet myself, watching this led me to ponder the relationship between the Romantic ideal of a heroic lone creator with the larger capitalist culture, its production of ruin in the course of a consumerist atomization of society, and how the apocalypses we conjure in our imaginations have their own daimonic power. None of these lessons are necessarily implicit in the film; I bring them up merely as a way of saying how thought-provoking I find this contemplative style of poetry filmmaking.
Afterimages by Mackenzie Duan
love everything about this animation by Evan Bode, though the first time I watched I wasn’t completely sold on the high school-aged poet Mackenzie Duan’s voiceover. On second viewing, I changed my mind, discovering, as Bode evidently did, that a youthful lack of assertiveness can code as sincerity and a kind of wisdom when one absorbs it in the overall context of the sound design, the intense colors, and most importantly the gorgeous lines of poetry. The film was created for Season 4 of the literary magazine Counterclock‘s Patchwork: Film x Poetry project,
a nine-week interdisciplinary arts fellowship open to filmmakers and poets. Filmmakers and poets are paired together to create original film-poems, or short films inspired by poetry. In the first half of the fellowship, each poet works to produce an original poem informed by both their and their partner’s creative interests; in the second half of the fellowship, each filmmaker works with their partner to adapt their partner’s poem into a short film.
Visit the film’s page at Counterclock to read the poem and bios. Here’s a snippet from the former:
Behind us, the hills
slope in brushstrokes over a lake,
soft and washed out, like the placefires go after burning.
Our bodies become stations of lightwhen the sun dips.
Crossing to Ireland by Jean Maskell
I always tend to feel that poetry animations are best at their most abstract and minimalistic—depending on the poem, of course. This animation by Rachel McMahon AKA RaeRae won the audience award at the Liverpool Celtic Animation Festival. It’s a collaboration with Jean Maskell, “a multi-disciplinary artist and writer inspired by contemporary and historic social issues and the natural world,” who provided the voiceover and text: a poem “about the conflicting emotions of feeling a part of two countries.” Perhaps it is that sense of a provisional existence that makes the kind of tentative approach to the animation—lines drawn and undrawn on white space with a paper grain—such a good fit.
