~ festivals and other screening events ~
News about any and all events in which poetry films/videos are prominently featured, whether or not they include an open competition. Please let us know about any we might miss. And don’t forget to check out our page of links to poetry film festivals. All festivals, events and calls for work are mentioned by MovingPoems 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.
Poetry Film Competition: Light Up Poole
Submissions are requested from poets and filmmakers as part of Light Up Poole, a unique digital Light Art Festival aiming to transform Poole’s town centre after dark from 15-17 February 2018.
Focussing on a theme of ‘Identity’, festival organisers are looking for films, up to a maximum of three minutes, that address the topic and consider how identity is reflected in contemporary society. What does it mean to be an individual, a member of a family, a worker in the city, in a rural setting, a person living in Britain today?
For the purpose of this submission request, a poetry film is defined as a fusion of spoken/written word with visual images where the combination of media provide a richer experience than either the spoken/written word or visual images could do on their own. In this instance, a poetry film isn’t simply a video recording of a poet reading a poem. The poetry film can also include music.
Prizes
Ten short-listed films will be shown at select venues in Poole’s town centre throughout the duration of the festival, with further screenings as a prelude to main cinema screenings at Lighthouse Poole during March/April 2018. The winning film will receive £500, to be shared between poet and film-maker in the case of collaborations.
Links to films must be received by 26th January 2018. High Definition files will be required for short-listed films.
Please send to matt@artfulscribe.co.uk
Judges
Lucy English is co-creator of the poetry film organisation, Liberated Words, which curates and screens poetry films. Lucy is best known as a performance poet who has published three novels and is currently a Reader at Bath Spa University where she teaches on the undergrad and Master’s Creative Writing courses. Her specialisms include writing for digital platforms.
Sarah Tremlett, MPhil, FRSA, SWIP, is a British poetry filmmaker, artist and arts theorist/writer, with a first-class honours degree in Fine Art and an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University. In 2012, she co-founded Liberated Words poetry film events with poet and novelist Lucy English to screen international poetry filmmakers alongside films made in the community, and co-conceived MIX conference, Bath Spa University.
Guidelines
Entry is free to anyone, and should be made via email to matt@artfulscribe.co.uk 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.
You may submit as many entries as you like. Films must interpret, be based on, or convey the festival theme. Non-English language films will require English subtitles.
Art Visuals & Poetry Film Festival Vienna 2017 winners announced
From the front page of poetryfilm-vienna.com/en:
ART VISUALS & POETRY FILMFESTIVAL VIENNA NOV 4 – 6, 2017
The award winners 2017
People, we had three great days with lots of fantastic poetry shorts. The festival donates 5 prizes. The festival awarded the Austrian animator Gudrun Krebitz for her film “Exomoon” with the main festival prize. The Rilke Competition prize or Special Award goes to Sebastian and Daniel Selke for their interpretation “rilke überoffen”. The only Honorable Mention of the Vienna Poetry Film Festival goes to Andrea Capranico from Italy for “The Landscape Within”. The Hubert Sielecki Award for the best Austrian poetry film of the festival goes to Moritz Stieber “Die Tatsachen im Fall Waldemar”. The OKTO audience award goes to Christian Heinbockel for his film “Lass uns von Liebe sprechen” or “Let´s speak about love”. Stay tuned. We will publish the jury statements soon!
Go here for the post in German.
Call for submissions: Weimar Poetry Film Award
Once again, the annual backup_festival at Bauhaus University and the Literary Society of Thuringia are cooperating to sponsor a poetry film prize in association with Poetryfilmkanal. The 2018 Weimarer Poetryfilmpreis is now open for submissions. Here’s the English version of their bilingual call:
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
Through the new film award, backup_festival and Literarische Gesellschaft Thüringen e.V. (LGT) 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 8:00 mins, which should explore the relation between film and written poetry in an innovative, straightforward way. Films that are produced before 2015 will not be considered. From all submitted films selected for the festival competition three Jury members will choose the winner of the main prize (1000 €). Moreover, an audience award of 250 € will be awarded.
The competition »Weimar Poetry Film Award« is financed by Kulturstiftung des Freistaats Thüringen, Thüringer Staatskanzlei and the City of Weimar.
Deadline: January 31th, 2018.
Form for submissions [pdf] by mail or e-mail.
Literarische Gesellschaft Thüringen e. V.
Marktstraße 2–4
99423 Weimar, Germany
Email: info@poetryfilmkanal.de
The »Weimar Poetry Film Award« call for entries is international. For the submission send with the other informations a quotable text of the related poem in German or English.
Presentation of awards: June 2nd, 2018.
More information about the program: www.backup-festival.de.
Link.
Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival 2017: Director’s Recap
Editor’s note: All week I’ve been sharing the winning films from RHPFF 2017, so I thought it only fitting that we wrap up with director Sou MacMillan’s perspective on how things went, reprinted from her personal blog. Be sure also to visit the Rabbit Heart YouTube channel to watch all the shortlisted films (conveniently arranged into playlists by category) as well as videos of the acceptance speeches and other snippets from the festival. And I just want to say to other poetry film festival directors: I’m sure it’s exhausting to put on something like this, but please do consider trying to document your events also, as Sou does, so we can all take inspiration from them. I’ll do my part by linking or reprinting here. —Dave
Festival? How was the festival this year? you ask. Well!
Let me start here:
Behold the perfect tool for your sustenance, the humble crockpot.
No, wait – lemme start here:
Rachel dearest sent that off from the bus on her way out of Worcester on Tuesday morning, and I blubbed some happy tears when I saw it.
Nonono – wait – listen:
I think I didn’t manage to put down 2016’s show until almost a year after the fact – there was just So Much. Too much, even. Dearest Bill’s heart surgery on October 5th, the flash floods day before show that washed out Nick’s, all that focus on waiting for the power to come back & the last-minute move over to HPCC. It was a rush, for sure, but really, let’s not do it like that again, k? And even with the grant reimbursement* wrapped up and the trophies mailed & the prize payments made, and the 2017 logo set up & stickers ordered, and the new season ready to go, it still sort of dragged on as this stressful pulsing echo, like, for months.** Until about a week before festival, I wasn’t even sure I was ready. I had nightmares about being pregnant in Patagonia (which, of course, was part of Peru, whut) & stamping around about it, y‘all.
And then Rabbit Heart this year? It was AMAZING. Ah-May-ZING.
Some stuff we learned last year was that you really can’t stuff 70+ people into Nick’s without a crowbar and some mad engineering skillz.*** So, armed with that knowledge, we intentionally split the 2017 show, and put together a matinee this year – which I panicked about for a hot minute (Will people come? Will I throw a party, and will people come to it? AND WHAT ABOUT BRUNCH?!) until I realized that it gave us o,somuchmoreroom! to show more films (\o/), and that lots of people nabbed those tickets because they were stoked (!!) and wanted to see more poetryfilm! And they came! We threw a party and people came! And they enjoyed the stuffing out of it! Hello, I am over the moon remembering all the smiles and hugs.
And then – and then – AND THEN! The awards ceremony! Our emcees for the night, Tony Brown & Melissa Mitchell, omg – these two glamorous bastards – I need a moment to get my marbles back in the jar here, because WOW.
Tony and Missy on the red carpet
Let us all fan ourselves off a minute here -whew!- Ok, steampuk became the theme for the night, Missy was armed to the teeth (check out that hawt whip, y’all), and the tone was set from the moment they stepped on the stage. So. GOOD.
The caliber of film this year made me wicked proud – I’m absolutely thrilled with the judges’ picks.† I can’t even pick the most stand-out-y of the bunch, because I kept falling in love over and over. You should go check out the 2017 Finalists Page and the R<3 YouTube page to see – grab a coffee and your comfiest hoodie, ‘cos you’ll want to be there a while <6
All that said, I need to tell you about the winner of Best Overall Production – Rachel Kann’s Dancing Lesson (Or How to Let the Words Leave You), made with Brad Cooper & Atom Smith – even just thinking about it right now makes all the little hairs stand up on my arms. Because you need to know: the women in that film with Rachel? Dancing like the queens they are? They are not professional dancers or actors. That’s Rachel’s Zumba class. (And I was told the shoot was a dream, and the hardest part of the whole she-bang was getting the colored Holi powder out of the sets three months after the fact. Which, of course, amuses me to no end.) RACHEL’S ZUMBA CLASS! Here – check it out.
There was so much dance this year! And it brought me to a place of joy I didn’t even know about. Sure, interpretive dance is an easy mark for eyeroll – we’ve all been to that one poetry reading, right? But this year, watching the subs roll in was a total game/perspective-changer – we got a ton of really good interpretive dance poetryfilms. The more interpretive dance I saw over the year, the more I realized how much I just love the stuff! And to be able to show films at the showcase matinee? Like Jeremy Hahn and Stephen Beitler’s Dances for the End of the World Ch 2, and videopoem I Am Life/ Soy Vida by Jose Alirio Rojas? It just set me soaring.
But but but! But omg, also the people! My very favorite thing about festival happened again this year – it became a gathering for some of my very favorite people. And getting to meet filmmakers and people new to the festival just leaves me bursting all over. I got to meet the winners of the WCPA-sponsored Shoots! Youth prize, Luz Emma Cañas & Ella Quinn who came in from NYC, I got to meet the producer of the Best Smartphone Production, Eduardo Guerra who came in from NY, I got to meet Nick who came out from CT for his friend Aleksandr Kirienko’s film, and the winners of The Marble Collection’s fundraiser raffle, and the folks who won the Sprinkler Factory’s raffle,†† and I got to meet director Brad Cooper and his lovely friend Linda, and I got to meet Aisha Naseem’s parents and their housemate Alex, and everyone was so lovely! And I got to reconnect with friends who traveled in from afar! Filmmakers Cassidy Parker Knight & Jeff Knight came in from Austin TX, and Rachel came in from LA, and Eric Darby came in from San Francisco, and Linda Jackson and filmmakers Aisha Naseem and Adom Balcom came in from western MA – and friends who came in from right here in town – Molly McArthur and Kerry McGurl who were our perfect ushers, Tony & Missy (natch), #TeamSalli, Sarah Meigs & Alli Jutras (our badass interns for 2017), and Birgit Straehle (who gilded our first place trophy!) & Luis Antonio Fraire, and two of last year’s exquisite judges, April & Ted Desmond, Isaac Baron and Sylvia Bagalio, and Rushelle Frazier and Jenith Charpentier and Angeline Bilotta who were judges this year, and Gary Hoare, who’s been a finalist and winner at R<3 three times now, and Angel, who’s been a judge twice, and Bob Gill (who judged our first year) & Ted Blackler, and and and and AND! It all happened in the company of family – what warm delight to share this with my dear husband Bill, and my brother Allan and my father-in-law Charlie††† who have been pulling this boat along with me for four years now (omg, fam – you are The Best).
And for real, Nick’s took such good care of us – huge kudos and thank yous to Nicole & Sean & the rest of the staff on Saturday for making such good space for us and treating us like a Very Big Deal. They made sure we had the sound and projector up and running, and a place for our red carpet, and that the popcorn & drinkies & treats flowed (Have you ever had a pretzel there?? Seriously. If you haven’t, you’re totally missing out, so you should do that).
What I mean to say is that this year tore me open in all the good ways. All this to say Thank You.
xoxox,
Apple
*Thank you WAC & MCC!
**I’m 100% sure some of that had to do with the US elections. That garbage storm is still cascading horrific on the daily.
***So the basement over at HPCC actually solved that problem >.>
†It wasn’t until after festival that I realized that all our winning films were made by women \o/ There’s something here that I have been struggling to put my finger on over the last few years – what is it about poetryfilm that lends women such good license, that allows them to give themselves permission to excel? Jenith & I keep spilling coffee over and spending time on this topic, and it never ceases to keep me feeling alive in my own skin.
††You have an osm arts org that wants fundraiser tickets? Talk to me!
†††Who totally saved our bacon last year with the whole venue thing. Thank you, Charlie!
ps! Omg, guise – LITERALLY, as I was writing this, my phone chirped and told me it made a movie memory out of the bazillionty pictures (ok, 372) I took at Rabbit Heart on Saturday – oh iPhone, you amazing creature, you <6 and it’s totally darling. Here it is –
pps – that song that everyone at festival can’t get out of their head? It’s by Erin K, and it’s amazing. Here – have a listen
Call for poetry submissions and filmmaker applications: Visible Poetry Project
The Visible Poetry Project, which released thirty poetry films—one a day—during April last year, and held several screenings in New York and Beijing, is aiming to do this same in 2018.
The Visible Poetry Project was founded in 2017 with the goal of bringing together a collective of filmmakers to create a series of videos that present poems as short films. Drawing from works created by renowned poets, including Neil Gaiman and Tato Laviera, as well as emerging poets, the Visible Poetry Project strives to make poetry accessible, exploring how we can recreate and experience poems through the medium of film.
Throughout the month of April – National Poetry Month – we release one visual poem each day. An exercise in translation and a reclamation of both poetic and film discourses, the resulting thirty videos explore how we read, interpret, visualize, and hear poetry.
Submissions are now open for the Visible Poetry Project 2018 series. If you would like to be involved with the Visible Poetry Project, or have any questions about our organization, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at visiblepoetryproject@gmail.com.
Here are the guidelines for filmmakers.
The Visible Poetry Project strives to emphasize the diversity of the global film community, and so encourage you to apply regardless of background or circumstance. Whether filmmaking is your hobby, profession, private outlet, or public expression, your work is welcome.
Within your application, please provide a reel and/or links to previous films you’ve created. All work samples must be original, and you must be one of the main contributors. You may submit up to three links. We recommend submitting samples that you believe to be representative of the greater styles and themes in your work. If you are accepted, this will help inform which poet you may get paired with.
You may apply as part of a team (up to two filmmakers). If you are applying as part of a team, please submit only one application. Please include links to reels for both collaborators, and send an email to visiblepoetryproject@gmail.com, CC’ing your co-director.
If you are a producer, director of photography, or editor, and are interested in being involved in the 2018 series, please email visiblepoetryproject@gmail.com.
Click through to submit an application. For poets, there’s a similar openness to all backgrounds and levels of professionalism. There’s a reading fee of just $2.75, though “an additional donation beyond this amount is suggested, and will go towards Visible Poetry Project’s operating expenses for the 2018 series.” Here’s the link to submit poetry.
Filmpoem Festival 2017 program released
The Filmpoem Festival slated for Saturday, 28 October in Lewes, UK has released a very full and innovative program.
Some of the UK’s best spoken word poets come together to perform live, integrated with films inspired by poetry. Depot screens film poems from around the world and shows some fantastic national poetry competition films. And then it’s your turn – we round the evening off with an open mic session.
Helmie Stil, organiser of this year’s festival and filmmaker, created this trailer mainly from footage of the new 10 National Poetry Competition Films which will be shown at the festival. Original music by Lennert Busch.
The events include:
- Première of two short animation films made by children during the Depot workshop, inspired by a poem by Colin West
- Live poetry performances by Louisa Campbell, Maria Jastrzębska and Siân Thomas
- Dean Atta will perform his poetry live, show his own poetry films, and also present three of his favorite poetry films from the South East
- Filmpoem and The Poetry Society present the 10 National Poetry Competition 2016 winners realized as poetry-film
- Madi Maxwell-Libby performs her poetry live, followed by a screening of the documentary We Belong, featuring Madi and seven other UK poets and spoken word artists on ‘state of the nation’ themes
- Ross Sutherland’s live performance of Stand-By For Tape Back-Up, his well-reviewed videopoem about memory, death and re-runs
- Open Competition winners presentation and screening
- Matt Abbott performs his poetry live and shows his poetry films
- Salena Godden, one of UK’s best spoken word poets, will perform exciting new work live, and will show, amongst other short films, her newest film poem RED, written and filmed in response to the tampon tax and period poverty
- Open mic
A hearty congratulations to the organizers for such an exciting line-up! Book your tickets today.
“Descrambled Eggs” wins 2017 Ó Bhéal Poetry Film Competition
Descrambled Eggs—the film by Kayla Jeanson with poet Steve Curry that I just shared on Moving Poems—has won the 2017 IndieCork award for best poetry film!
Congrats to Kayla Jeanson @Shadling for winning the 5th Ó Bhéal @IndieCork Poetry-Film Comp, with Descrambled Eggs! https://t.co/uljcHvCzo0 pic.twitter.com/0uHpPPpdGV
— Ó Bhéal (@OBheal) October 15, 2017
I swear I had nothing to do with this. (I didn’t even notice that it was on the Ó Bhéal shortlist when I shared it.) The winner was chosen by poet Lani O’Hanlon and filmmaker Shaun O’Connor from among the 30 films screened earlier today as part of the IndieCork Festival. Congratulations to Kayla and Steve, as well as to all the other filmmakers and poets selected for this increasingly competitive and highly regarded annual poetry film festival.
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 QuelhasPrémio do PÚBLICO NACIONAL:
‘A Montanha’ de Pedro CaldeiraPrémio VENCEDOR NACIONAL
‘Running Man’ de Pedro Sena NunesINTERNACIONAL
Vencedor Internacional
‘Spree’ de Martin Kelly & Ian McBrydePrémio 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.
Introducing the Film and Video Poetry Society
Over the past two years, a mysterious, L.A.-based group called the Film and Video Poetry Society have built up a tremendous following for their Facebook page, on which they regularly share a wide variety of poetry films and videopoems from around the web. I liked the results so much, I included the link among the short selection of recommended sites at the bottom of the front page of Moving Poems — the first and so far only time I’ve done that for a page on the ubiquitous but web-destroying colossus that is Facebook.
Well, as of August 1 I no longer have to do that, because at long last they’ve debuted their own web platform… and it’s a doozy. Features include a live, TV-like channel of poetry videos, a finishing fund and production assistance program for poetry filmmakers, poetry translation assistance, and even a plan for print publications. Perhaps of most interest to readers of Moving Poems, they are welcoming submissions of film and video projects up to 32 minutes long for a big annual symposium to be held on April 27th – 28th, 2018 in Los Angeles. It would probably be easiest if I just pasted in the text of their About page:
OUR MISSION
The Film and Video Poetry Society (FVPS) mission is to encourage film and video poets to further their ongoing explorations by providing a platform for these artists to activate, collaborate, discuss, and maintain creative work developed through the convergence of these art forms.
FVPS PROGRAMS AND INITIATIVES
Finishing Fund
The first of our initiatives is The FVPS Finishing Fund and Assistance Program. This production award will assist film and video poetry projects that have started the creative process and seek additional assistance or funds to complete the final stages of production.Poetry Beam
We established an experimental distribution, archival, and publishing format for film and video poetry. Poetry Beam is focused on audience development, live streaming, digital curation, film and video exhibition, immersive technologies, and new methods of media licensing.Events
The Film and Video Poetry Society is dedicated to providing a platform for oral and written literature. We are doing this by coordinating international events such as poetry slams, readings, virtual panels, writing rooms, and pop-up poetry book-shops.Annual Symposium
FVPS is also organizing an annual symposium where we will host film screenings, workshops, and panels for a two day period each spring.Publishing
FVPS is currently adapting two poetry films into chapbooks and has published A Guide to Film and Video Poetry festivals!Translations
Finally, FVPS supports language diversity. Our efforts to assist poets and filmmakers to access wider audiences and festival markets include subtitling and closed captioning assistance for films of any language.
FVPS is developing a closed captioning app to offer video editors low cost multilingual translation on an academic level.The Film and Video Poetry Society embraces a demanding dream. We strive to balance our new world’s increased desire for visual content with our old world love for literacy, printed matter, and the poetic word.
We are deeply grateful for the poets and filmmakers who contacted us over the past year. The contributions of your work and the many ideas you have shared inspired our team to launch this platform.
Thank you for reading our mission statement and we encourage you to explore this website.
Click through to join their mailing list and check out the site.
A small disclosure: I have been in contact with someone (not sure who) from the FVPS a couple of times, and provided a critique of the site before it went public. They assure me they will reveal their identities soon, when they unveil a masthead. I am as always happy to welcome new websites and initiatives to the international poetry film/video fold, and I’ll be watching FVPS with particular interest given their evident good taste in poetry videos, their proven ability to generate social media buzz, and their physical location near the world’s most powerful center of cinematic production. I think their primary focus on filmmakers and artists makes great practical sense, because in my experience there’s much more openness to poetry film and videopoetry in those kinds of circles than (sadly) among poets.
Call for work: 6th CYCLOP International Poetry Film Contest
On August 1, it was announced that the 6th CYCLOP Poetry Film Festival will be held on November 25-26, 2017 in Kyiv (Kiev), Ukraine. Filmmakers have until Sept. 30 to submit work. Visit their website for the rules and regulations, which I’ll also paste in below:
- Films of up to 10 minutes duration that are no more than two years old (January 2015) may be entered.
- There are no limitation about subject and language restrictions. All films that are not in English must have English subtitles. Each application must also contain the text of the verse in English.
- Video can be performed in any techniques using any necessary equipment (video, animation, flash etc).
- Each video should be placed on the Youtube channel in free access.
- By sending your film, you confirm that the film may be shown at the CYCLOP Poetry Film Festival. The artist must have all property and screening rights.
- Each artist can’t send more than two videos.
- All videos must be sent with the following characteristics:
File format: .MOV or .AVI.
Standard: PAL. Codec: H264.
Resolution: HD — 1920 x 1080 or 1280 x 720 (16:9) / SD — 640 x 480 (4:3) or 640 x 360 (16:9)
Click through for the entry form, names of the jury members, timeline for scoring and other information.
Review of Poetry Film screening at the MIX conference
Bath Spa University, July 2017
Revolution, Regeneration, Reflections. These were the themes chosen for the MIX 2017 conference to celebrate the human capacity for renewal and experimentation combined with deep thought and to look at where creative writing, storytelling, and media creation intersect with and/or are dependent upon technology. The programme featured a mix of academic papers, practitioner presentations, seminars, keynotes, discussions, workshops and poetry film screenings.
Artists/poets and digital writers were asked to submit poetry films/film poems/video poetry responding to these themes. Nineteen poetry films from the international submissions received were screened throughout the duration of the conference.
The selection was curated by Lucy English, Reader in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and co-founder of Liberated Words, and Zata Banks, founder of PoetryFilm, an influential research arts project and film screening series.
I wondered if the themes of revolution, regeneration and reflections were too optimistic in theme. Perhaps war, power, consumerism, genocide, apocalypse, violence and chaos are nearer to what governs our thoughts at present.
Some of the poetry films covered predictable ground: love, word play, abstracts and introspection. Other films braved the realms of suicide, oppression, humour and sustainability. Some were cleverly and/or beautifully designed, others revealed their workings (you almost saw the filmmaker at work).
The curation itself was expertly put together. The viewer could watch to the end without feeling bombarded or overwhelmed, while at the same time feeling they had traveled; a journey which was troubling at times, more re-assuring at the end. We were taken from political marginalisation and resistance to universal sustainability in 19 films.
The first film, If We Must Die by Othneil Smith, used imagery from a 1970s Blaxploitation film to highlight resistance and a 1919 sonnet written in response to attacks on African-American communities, and began:
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
The last film, Kate Flaherty’s A Mouse’s Prayer, with a delicate voice and a mouse’s prayer to the moon, ended:
O moon, you see me
when others do not,
you know my brown fur’s sheen,
and you reflect for me
my own great smallness
in your immensely
dark and speckled sky.
At the end of the first film and the beginning of the last film, the viewer literally looked into someone’s face. This created an intimate space, connected the viewer to the personal and forged the link between responsibility and hope.
Whilst I watched, I kept thinking: this is a poet’s curation (but then, what is a poetry film if it’s not poetry?). There were no long distracting pages of seemingly endless credits, no words were trying to compete with images and there were no excessive soundtracks. Almost all the films selected had near equal elements of sound, image and text.
Selecting for a poetry film curation isn’t just about choosing the best films submitted. The films need to sit alongside one another to flow, illuminate, juxtapose — the whole should be greater than the sum of its parts.
I was able to recognize Zata’s experimental film choices that invited us to focus on semiotics. The meaning making systems in the elements that make up the films (sound, movement, etc). In Matthew Griffith’s Pain in Colour, we were asked to find meaning through colour, movement and sound but with no words.
But can you have a poem without words? I’m not sure. But I know you can have a ‘poetic experience’ and Pain in Colour offered up its own meanings within the whole curation. I’m not sure it would have done so on its own. I would prefer to see it in a gallery space, where I may be less self-conscious of finding a specific context and meaning.
The territory of poetry film is still being mapped. And as I watched the films the nagging question hanging in the mainly empty auditorium was ‘What is poetry film?’ The curation didn’t direct me to the answer. But it led me to wonder if poetry film needs to be more confident in embracing its own genres (whether that is seen as another type of art film or an entirely new genre of poetry), and then we may be nearer to developing clearer analytical language and critical discourses.
In the middle of the curation, the background evangelist in Cindy St. Onge’s Road to Damascus and the end line in Dave Bonta’s Grassland, “I’ll break like bread at your table”, gave a jolt toward the anxieties of faith and a hope for something more, and was a reminder that the curation was a journey from resistance to sustainability.
Angie Bogachenko’s version of Oracle of a Found Shoe and the collaboration between Cheryl Gross and Lucy English, Shop, both animations, demonstrated that animation works when the images and words work together, where you can’t see the seam between the two. Both showed the strength of the poem and the skill of the animator.
I noted that 11 of the 19 films, by nature of the poem or the choice of presentation, had a strong performance element. This reflects the balance of new work that I have seen emerging elsewhere. Poetry film is an ideal medium to embody spoken word poetry, and as a genre I think it will bring an immediate and urgent contribution to the field.
By design or chance, the curation at MIX 2017 brought a rhythm, line by line, film by film, that on a large scale was sustained to the end. The themes created a forward momentum — and that reflects the journey of poetry film itself.
