Filmmaker: Beate Kunath

[meine heimat] by Ulrike Almut Sandig (6)

Poet: | Nationality: | Filmmaker: ,

A film by Beate Kunath and Marlen Pelny of b-k productions in Germany. The synopsis on YouTube, rendered into English with the help of Google Translate, says something to the effect of

Where is home when she feels nowhere? For some, searching and finding the home is an evolving process, not a self-evident accessory from birth.

This is probably the last film adaptation of Sandig’s poem I’ll be sharing here, though there are certainly some others online that also have points to recommend them. Challenging filmmakers to work with a supplied text does make for an interesting contest; we even did it at Moving Poems back in 2011, with a poem by Howie Good (contest winners here and here). But such an approach tends to favor the merely illustrative, as I think we’ve seen this week with the difficulty filmmakers have had escaping the orbit of the text’s avian imagery. I would instead encourage festival organizers to consider the opposite sort of contest: supply a couple of minutes of footage and challenge filmmakers and writers to make a videopoem out of it. The results would likely be much more varied.