Search Results for: avi dabach

Young David by Yehuda Amichai (with discussion by Edward Hirsch)

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http://vimeo.com/24221256

Avi Dabach’s marvelous film interpretation of Amichai’s “Young David” (translated by Abraham Birman) is wrapped within a video introduction and post-film discussion by Bob Holman and Edward Hirsh at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City. Hirsch describes his own, elliptical approach to politics in poetry, and says that Amichai was his major influence and model in this regard.

Zman / Time by Mei-Tal Nadler

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A new poetry film by Avi Dabach with text by Mei-Tal Nadler and music by Harold Robin. Einat Weizman read the poem and Adriana X. Jacobs provided the English translation used in the subtitles.

Nadler won the 2014 Teva Prize for Poetry, whence this bio:

May-Tal Nadler is a poet and doctoral student of literature and Israeli culture at Tel Aviv University. Her first book of poetry, Experiments in Electricity, was published this year.
Nadler has previously won the Ministry of Culture’s award for poets for 2008 and was among the prize winners of the 2008 Poetry Along the Way competition, sponsored by the city of Tel Aviv. Her manuscript won the Leib Goldberg award for literary work.

Nidon (Condemned) / נידון by Haim Lensky

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A new poetry film from Israeli director Avi Dabach. According to the Wikipedia,

Haim Lensky (1905–1942 or 1943), also Hayyim Lensky, was a Russian poet who wrote in Hebrew. He wrote the bulk of his verse while imprisoned in several Soviet labor camps from 1934 onward.

Spring 82 by T. Carmi

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A film by Avi Dabach with acrobatics and choreography by Reenat Caidar and sound design by Gai Sherf.

The Altruist by T. Carmi

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A moving tribute to the power of poetry from Israeli filmmaker Avi Dabach and PTSD-sufferer Micha Shalvi, who describes how the poem by T. Carmi — which he reads at the end — saved his life.

Mountain High by Tal Nitzan

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Avi Dabach directs. The original music and soundtrack are by Anat Gutman, and the reading is from the poet herself. A recent online publication of two poems by Tal Nitzan in English translation, at Writestuff, includes this bio:

Tal Nitzan has published four collections of poetry: Domestica, An Ordinary Evening, Café Soleil Bleu, [and] The First to Forget and won many awards. Nitzan is the editor of the anthology With an Iron Pen: Hebrew Protest Poetry 1984 – 2004.

Making of Poetic Encounters

This brief documentary on the making of the three poetry films to emerge from the 2010 ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival workshop (see the previous three posts here to watch videos of the films) is a must-watch for anyone interested in ekphrastic collaboration. I was particularly impressed by poet Monika Rinck’s remarks on the life of a poem beyond the page, and her interest in avoiding the sort of filmmaker who might over-interpret a poem:

I like poems and I think also movies about poems to guard a certain openness. I don’t want to have the pictures in the poem locked, as if it couldn’t be otherwise, as if the pictures of the movie override everything which was open before.

I also liked her collaborator Avi Dabach’s admission that he is better able to connect with poems that he doesn’t fully understand, implying that the making of a poetry film is a kind of close reading or exercise in hermaneutics.

Christmas in Huntsville, Texas by Jan Wagner

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The world’s premiere poetry film festival, ZEBRA, in Berlin, has now begun sponsoring the production of new videopoems as well, as the video description on Vimeo makes clear:

The result of the Film-Workshop held during the 5th ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival. Three pairs of artists comprising Israeli filmmakers Emanuella Amichai, Avi Dabach and Joshua Simon and German poets Daniel Falb, Monika Rinck and Jan Wagner were working together to produce scripts and create poetry films in six days.

The poet here, Jan Wagner, is also a “translator of poetry from the English (including Charles Simic, James Tate, Simon Armitage, Jo Shapcott, Louis MacNeice, Kevin Young),” according to this online CV.