~ calls for work ~
All festivals, events and calls for work are mentioned by Moving Poems with our best efforts and in good faith. However, do check all details yourself as we cannot guarantee accuracy, and make your own judgements because we cannot verify the things that we share. Events may fail for a variety of genuine reasons, or may be a scam to elicit fees.
IT’S ALIVE! Visible Verse Festival announces new director, issues call for entries
Vancouver’s Visible Verse Festival is the longest-running poetry film and videopoetry festival in North America, and last April we shared the sad news that its founder and long-time director Heather Haley had reluctantly decided that she couldn’t do it anymore. Today on their Facebook group page, however, writer and entrepreneur Ray Hsu posted:
Just wanted to give y’all a heads up that Visible Verse is on for this October. Longtime Artistic Director Heather Haley will continue to offer her wealth of knowledge as an Advisor while I will step in as Artistic Director. I will try my absolute best to fill her shoes. :)
And he shared this Call for Entries:
VISIBLE VERSE FESTIVAL 2015
Call for Entries and Official Guidelines:
We seek videopoems and poetry films with a 7 minute maximum duration.
Works will be judged by their aesthetic interest, innovation and the integration/interplay between film and poetry.
The ideal video poem plays with image and word, whether the words are seen, heard or otherwise approached in the context of the piece.
Please do not send documentaries as they are beyond the scope of this genre.
Entries in any language are accepted, though if the video is not in English, then an English-dubbed or -subtitled version is preferred. Videopoems may come from any part of the world.
Please submit by sending the URL to your videopoem for previewing, along with a brief bio and contact information to Ray Hsu (Artistic Director) at drrayhsu@gmail.com.
If selected, you will receive notification and further instructions. Selected artists will be paid a standard screening fee.
VISIBLE VERSE FESTIVAL 2015 is scheduled to take place in October at the Cinematheque in Vancouver, Canada, in October.
DEADLINE: August 15, 2015
This is such great news. A huge thanks to Ray Hsu for stepping up and to Heather Haley for agreeing to stay on in an advisory capacity. Please join me in wishing them every success in this transition period, and do consider sending your best work.
Call for submissions: poetry films about love
The UK-based PoetryFilm art project welcomes general submissions throughout the year, but director Zata Banks has just issued a special invitation to submit poetry films about love:
All topics and themes are welcome, and material exploring LOVE is invited specifically for an event in December 2015.
Work welcome: poetry films, art films, text films, sound films, silent films, collaborations, auteur films, films based on poems, poems based on films, and other experimental text/image/sound screening and performance material. Submissions will be catalogued in the PoetryFilm Archive and will be considered for all future PoetryFilm projects.
Please send hard copies of film submissions in the post (e.g. DVD, USB stick). If you are sending a DVD, please make sure that your DVD is properly formatted and that it will play correctly.
Submission Form
Please click here to download the PoetryFilm Submission Form 2015.
Please send your work together with the form to: PoetryFilm, First Floor, 85 Harwood Road, Fulham, London SW6 4QL.
– A fully completed Submission Form must accompany all submissions
– Please print out and include hard copies of all the additional material you would like to have considered as part of your submission
– Please do not write website links or “see website” on the form
– Please do not submit links by e-mail or through social media
Deadline
The event featuring poetry films about LOVE will take place in December 2015; however, all submissions will be catalogued in the PoetryFilm Archive and will be considered for all future events.
Questions
Please email info@poetryfilm.org if you have any questions. Thanks.
If you’d like to attend a PoetryFilm screening to see what it’s like, there’s one coming up in London in just three weeks: PoetryFilm Parallax, ICA Cinema, Sunday 16 August, 4pm, and another one the following month, also in London: the PoetryFilm Equinox event at The Groucho Club Cinema on Sunday 27 September.
Call for submissions: Film-poems at Lighthouse
An arts organization called Lighthouse in Dorset, UK issued a call for submissions back on July 3 which I only just became aware of (sorry!). The deadline is August 20th. They offer a poster version of their call as a PDF, but I’d prefer to share it in text form from their website:
Lighthouse is inviting submissions for an exciting new project highlighting film-poetry, a developing hybrid art-form that connects the apparently disparate worlds of the moving image and the written word.
Film-Poems are typically short, usually just two or three minutes long, featuring a voiceover or talking head and images that connect to the text in some way.
To be launched in October, Film-Poems @ Lighthouse will feature 24 short films to be screened over the course of a year in the Cinema at Lighthouse.
“It’s about exploring new ways of presenting poetry, moving poetry away from people’s expectations and reaching out to the YouTube generation – something to have fun with,” says Lighthouse writer in residence Simon McCormack.
Films can be lo-fi, shot on phones, or they might be packed with wild graphics. There can be a narrative flow or not, literal representations of the words, or something more abstract.
For this series we have chosen the theme of ‘performance’. We want entries to be as adventurous as possible with their interpretation. The idea of performance runs through our everyday experience – there’s the ballet dancer on stage, the paint applied to the canvas, the child carefully spelling a word, the lollipop man holding up traffic and music heard through an open window. Go to the people and places where you find performance and show them to us.”
Submissions guidelines:
Films must be no longer than three minutes.
In the first instance email a link to the entry to submissions@lighthouse.co.uk stating ‘Film-Poems’ in the heading.
Please include a paragraph or two about yourself in the main body of the email.
If accepted we will ask you to send a good digital copy.
By submitting you agree to Lighthouse showing your work in the Cinema. You retain full rights to the work.
The closing date for submissions in 20 August.
Call for Submissions: 4th International Video Poetry/Film Poetry Festival in Athens
The +Institute [for Experimental Arts] and Void Network have just issued a call for the 4th International Video Poetry Festival 2015, linking to guidelines which refer to it as the International Film Poetry Festival. Regardless of which name you use, the deadline for submissions is November 20, and this will be their fourth year of putting on an event which stands out from the crowd of international videopoetry/poetry film festivals for its street-wise style and anarchist philosophy:
The yearly International Video Poetry Festival 2015 will be held for fourth time in Greece in Athens. Approximately 2000 people attended the festival last years
There will be two different zones of the festival. The first zone will include video poems, visual poems, short film poems and cinematic poetry by artists from all over the world (America, Asia, Europe, Africa). The second zone will include cross-platform collaborations of sound producers and music groups with poets and visual artists in live improvisations.
The International Video Poetry Festival 2015 attempts to create an open public space for the creative expression of all tendencies and streams of contemporary visual poetry.
It is very important to notice that this festival is a part of the counter-culture activities of Void Network and + the Institute [for Experimental Arts] and will be non-sponsored, free entrance, non commercial and non profit event. The festival will cover the costs (2000 posters, 15.000 flyers, high quality technical equipment e.t.c.) from the incomes of the bar of the festival.All the participating artists and the organizing groups will participate voluntary to the festival.
Void Network started organizing multi media poetry nights in 1990. Void Network and +the Institute [for Experimental Arts] believe that multi media Poetry Nights and Video Poetry shows can vibrate in the heart of Metropolis, bring new audiences in contact with contemporary poetry and open new creative dimensions for this ancient art. To achieve this, we respect the aspirations and the objectives of the artists, create high quality self organized exhibition areas and show rooms, we work with professional technicians and we offer meeting points and fields of expression for artists and people that tend to stand antagonistically to the mainstream culture.
Click through for links to photos from past years as well as the guidelines.
Call for submissions: Motionpoems’ Big Bridges Film Festival
Five finalist poems have been selected for Motionpoems’ Big Bridges project, and now a second competition has been announced, this time to select films made from three of those poems. The deadline is August 10, so you don’t have very much time. Links to the poems and full details are on the Motionpoems website. I’ll quote the description from their email newsletter, which was more succinct:
CALL FOR FILMS: $2500 in Prizes
Motionpoems invites filmmakers to create short films designed to inspire engineers, architects, and designers with ideas for the future of big bridges. America’s bridges are failing, and Target Studio at the Weisman Art Museum of the University of Minnesota is stirring public conversation by mounting a multidisciplinary exhibit that dreams big about big bridges. A national poetry contest has resulted in five finalist poems on this theme; we’re making three of those poems available to develop into your own short film; you could come away with a share of $2500 in awards. The deadline is August 10, 2015. Click here to read finalist poems, read the guidelines and enter the contest.
The Big Bridges Film Festival will be held on September 30, 2015 at the University of Minnesota.
Motionpoems announce partnership with Cave Canem for Season 7, issue call for submissions
I was very interested to see this announcement in the sidebar of Motionpoems‘ latest email newsletter:
We’re excited to be partnering with Cave Canem as our exclusive content partner for next season! Founded in 1996, this organization is a home to the many voices of African American poetry. All of next season’s motionpoems will come from African American writers. If you’re a Cave Canem fellow, we want you to submit. Contact Cave Canem for more details.
As curator of Moving Poems, I’ve been frustrated with the relative scarcity of good poetry films and videopoems featuring the work of African American poets, though it’s offset to some extent by a proliferation of performance documentary videos. (And frankly, I might miss a lot because of my tendency to search Vimeo rather than YouTube.) So I am very cheered to learn about this. It seems like a logical development from Motionpoems’ partnership with VIDA for the current season to put a spotlight on women poets.
Submissions are open for 3rd Ó Bhéal International Poetry-Film Competition 2015
This week, the Cork, Ireland-based poetry organization Ó Bhéal, in association with the IndieCork festival of independent cinema, issued a call for submissions:
This is Ó Bhéal’s sixth year of screening poetry-films (or video-poems) and the third year featuring an International competition.
Up to thirty films will be shortlisted and screened during the festival, from 4th-11th October 2015. One winner will receive the Indie Cork / Ó Bhéal Poetry-Film prize, selected by this year’s Ó Bhéal judges:
Patrick Cotter and Padraig Trehy
Deadline for submissions is the 15th of September 2015.
Guidelines
Entry is free to anyone, and should be made via email to poetryfilm [at] obheal.ie – including the following info in an attached word document:
- Name and duration of Film
- Name of director
- Country of origin
- Contact details
- Name of Poet
- Name of Poem
- Synopsis
- Filmmaker biography
- and a Link to download a high-resolution version of the film.
Films must interpret or be based on a poem, and have been completed no earlier than the 1st August 2013. They may not exceed 10 minutes in duration. Non-English language films will require English subtitles.
The final programme (shortlist) will be available via both the Ó Bhéal and IndieCork websites as of the 30th of September 2015.
Hope to see you there!
2015 Art Visuals & Poetry Film Festival open to submissions from German-speaking countries
METRO Kinokulturhaus, Vienna
The Vienna-based Art Visuals & Poetry Film Festival has opened submissions to their 2015 competition — but only to residents of Austria, Germany and Switzerland, or filmmakers with citizenship in those countries. A more international “special prize” can’t be given this year for budgetary reasons, they say; focusing on the three German-speaking countries (rather than just Austria) for the main competition is therefore a compromise. (Or so I gather from Google’s not terribly adequate machine translation.) A grand prize winner will be awarded 400 Euros, and announcements of other prizes will be forthcoming.
The festival is also moving to a new venue this year: METRO Kinokulturhaus, “one of the most beautiful cinemas in Vienna.” An exact date has yet to be announced.
Submissions are through an online form, and the deadline is September 15.
Deadlines approach for Filmpoem Festival, ‘Bring a Poem to Life’ competition, and Rabbit Heart
Two calls for work previously announced here are closing in early May, while a third stays open until July 1, allowing a little more time for procrastinators (in whose company I proudly include myself). Those submission deadlines:
- May 1: Filmpoem Festival Fifteen
- May 5: “Bring a Poem to Life” competition for UK secondary school students
- July 1: 2015 Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival
In the much longer term, submissions to Carbon Culture‘s $1000 poetry film prize are open until January 1. But there’s been a little more information about it since I originally posted their call:
Zata Kitowski, director of PoetryFilm, will pick the grand prize winner and finalists. The winning entry will receive $1,000.00. The top five entries will receive high-profile placements across a number of networks, note in a one page ad alongside honorable mentions in our newsstand print and device editions. All entries are considered for sponsored entry to our list of film festivals and poetry film festivals.
And speaking of Zata Banks (née Kitowski), it’s worth pointing out that submissions to PoetryFilm never close — there’s no deadline whatsoever. Which does put us procrastinators in a bit of a bind.
Call for poems to be turned into films about “Big Bridges”
The Minneapolis-based poetry-film organization Motionpoems, in cooperation with the Weisman Art Museum of the University of Minnesota, is seeking submissions to a poetry-film installation called Big Bridges.
See your poem turned into a film! Calling all artists, designers, engineers, poets, and the entire community…Join us in a creative dialogue to establish the expectations, possibilities, and aspirations for the future of our Big Bridges over the Mississippi River. America’s bridges are failing. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, 25% of America’s bridges are structurally deficient or functionally obsolete.
To inspire future engineers, Motionpoems and Target Studio at the Weisman Art Museum of the University of Minnesota invite poets to dream big about bridges. We want poems to inspire our nation’s designers, engineers, and architects to reimagine the future of America’s big bridges. You might send us a poem that imagines a physical bridge of the future or one that conceptualizes the idea of bridging in a big way or you might send us a poem that reinterprets bridge-crossing for a new age. Broad interpretations of the theme encouraged. Executive director of the Poetry Society of America and former New Yorker poetry editor Alice Quinn will judge this poetry contest.
Five winners will:
- receive $1,000
- see their poems turned into short films
- see those films at the Weisman Art Museum
- receive airfare/accommodations to attend the premiere in Minneapolis (date to be announced).
The deadline for submissions is April 30, and only poets resident in the U.S. may enter. Click through and scroll down past the images to read the terms of entry. There will be a second call for entries, this time to U.S. filmmakers, at a yet-to-be-determined date after the five poems have been chosen.
Cambridge University Press sponsors poetry film competition for UK school students
British students between the ages of 14 and 18 are encouraged to “bring a poem to life” by making a poetry film. The contest pitch is aimed at teachers:
Encourage your students to enter our multimedia poetry competition for their chance to win some fantastic prizes.
Engaging students with poetry is often a challenging and difficult area of teaching English. To help you encourage your students to develop an appreciation of poetry, we invite your students (recommended for KS4 and 5) to enter our ‘Bring a Poem to Life’ competition, a multimedia approach to exploring and enjoying poetry.
How to enter
To enter, students must submit a ‘poem film’ with an audio recording of one of the poems below and film their own video clip or clips which will fit the mood, tone and meaning of the poem for a chance of grabbing a great prize.
Submissions can be from an individual student or a group of students (maximum five students per group). Students or teachers can choose from one of four poems from the current AQA Poetry Anthology ‘Moon on the Tides’.
The poems the students can work with include “The Charge of the Light Brigade” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “London” by William Blake, “The Farmer’s Bride” by Charlotte Mew, and “My Last Duchess” by Robert Browning. Author Trevor Millum is the judge. The competition is open to all UK students, recommended for KS4 and KS5, and closes on 5th May 2015. Click through for complete rules and guidelines.
Call for submissions: Usurp Zone5 Film Festival
London’s Usurp Art Gallery is planning a film festival this summer, and the call for entries explicitly mentions poetry films as one of the things they’re interested in. I also like the emphasis on films or videos made with little or no money:
Free submission!
Submission deadline: 20 April 2015
Festival dates: 17 July – 2 August 2015Usurp Zone5 – an eclectic festival curated by the Usurp Art Gallery that will showcase inventive work by low-budget / no budget film and video makers in a gallery setting.
Think – abstract, absurd, activist, animated, asemic, clandestine, collage, conceptual, cut-ups, environment, experimental, glitsch, graffiti, graphic, identity, kinetic, outsider, paracinematic, performance, plunderphonic, poetry, radio, rebellious, scores, sci-art, scratch, silent, sonic, subterranean, subversive, surreal, synesthetic, typographic, video art…This is a UK and International call out so show us what you have!
Usurp Art Gallery develops opportunities for creative and critical voices from the margins – open to experimental ideas in all media. The Usurp Zone5 Film Festival will also launch our Usurp Film Club.
Visit the festival website for submission forms and more.
