2017 is a year which marks many significant anniversaries; political, sociological and creative. In 1517 Martin Luther nailed his Disputation to the church door in Wittenburg. Jane Austen died in 1817. 1917 marked the start of the Russian Revolution. In 1967 Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released by the Beatles and kicked off the Summer of Love, and in 1977 everything went punk.

To celebrate the human capacity for renewal and experimentation combined with deep thought, the themes for MIX 2017 are revolutions, regenerations, reflections. We asked artists/poets and digital writers to submit poetry films/film poems/video poetry responding to these themes. Twenty films have been selected from an international cohort and they will be screened in our Viewing Theatre throughout the duration of the conference.

This selection has been curated by Lucy English, Reader in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, co-founder of Liberated Words which creates, curates and screens poetry films, and Zata Banks, founder of PoetryFilm, an influential research arts project and film screening series.

The selected films reveal the energy and commitment to the poetry film genre by its practitioners, and explore the different approaches to combining words with moving image. Some of our filmmakers are well known and have received many accolades; others are new to the field.

Revolution

Othneil Smith, If We Must Die

Tommy Becker, Song for Disobedient Youth

Lemar Barrett, Electric Roses

Jordan Caylor, Untitled

Helen Dewbery, The Goose

Manuel Vilarinho, No Pais Dos Sacanas

Regeneration

Jim Pomeroy, Words

Marie Craven, Anatomy

Cindy St. Onge, Road to Damascus

Dave Bonta, Grassland

Matthew Griffith, Pain in Colour

Reflections

Damon Moore, The Multi Storey Car Park in Trenchard Street

Shuhei Hatona, Seventh Window

Valerie LeBlanc and Daniel Dugas, Illumination

Sophie Seita, Objects I Cannot Touch

Angie Bogachenko, Oracle of a Found Shoe

Cheryl Gross, Shop

Fin Harvor, The Carpet 1

Andrew Demirijan, I Tremble with Anticipation

Kate Flaherty, A Mouse’s Prayer

More information about the films and the film makers/poets will be posted on the MiX conference website.

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Lucy English

Lucy English is a spoken word poet, poetry filmmaker and novelist. She is Professor of Creative Enterprise and The Spoken Word at Bath Spa University and has a PhD on spoken word in poetry film. She has three novels published by Fourth Estate and two collections of poetry published by Burning Eye Books.  Her 2018 online poetry film project The Book of Hours was shortlisted for the New Media Writing Prize. She was co-editor and writer of Spoken Word in the UK published by Routledge in 2021. Lucy is the co-organiser of the Mix Digital conferences at Bath Spa University and co-director of Lyra, The Bristol Poetry Festival. Her most recent project, ‘Cancer Alley‘, a poetry film hologram installation created with Outlier Moving Pictures, was screened at The Watershed in Bristol in April 2024.

www.knibbworld.com/lucy/

• Poetry Film at UK's Lyra Bristol Poetry Festival
• Call for work: MIX 2019, Experiential Storytelling
• Poetry Film Competition: Light Up Poole