Posts By Dave Bonta

Dave Bonta is a poet, editor, and web publisher from the Appalachian mountains of central Pennsylvania.

Call for work: Living With Buildings festival

Living With Buildings logo

From FilmFreeway:

A festival of films exploring how people interacts with buildings and urban spaces in the public realm. We aim to screen short films/poetry film that investigates how we experience the build environment.

[LIVING WITH BUILDINGS is brought to you by the Disappear Here poetry film project]

We’re looking for work up to 5 mins in length, anything between the poetry-film, experimental, short-documentary strands of film-making. The project is rooted in the UK city of Coventry, famed for its ringroad, modernist architecture and reinvention as a city rising from the ashes and ruins of arial bombing in World War Two – we are happy to consider work from citizens all around the world.

The psychopathology of underpass and overground.

Floating towers holding up the sky.

Living With Buildings.

Finding our way(s) through the subterranean culture and dead roads with no ending.
Exploring internal tensions between regeneration and gentrification.

Remaking and remodelling urban spaces as forces of commerce or gentle revolution take hold and fight for ownership.

Where does the citizen fit into these processes; and how do we interpret or express their experiences of the ground shifting beneath their feet.

Find out more about the Disappear Here project – http://www.disappear-here.org

VENUE
LTB SHOWROOMS (above the Litten Tree pub) – COVENTRY – CV1 1EX – 1 Warwick Road

Please submit one film only – max five minutes in length – we will consider longer documentary work – but please enquire first.

Films must meet the subject theme – this is open to interpretation but expect film-makers to read the submission information for guidance.

The project selection decisions are final.

The deadline is 6 April. £5 to submit, or £4.50 if you’re a student. Here’s the link.

Reconnections: free online screening of poetry films at Lyra Bristol Poetry Festival

Pleased to see this:

Reconnections banner

Date: Saturday 17th April 2021
Price: Free
Time: 12:00 – 1:00pm

A screening of poetry films on the theme of Reconnection, curated by Liberated Words. Reconnection to landscape, the body, our history, family and heritage, during and before the pandemic. Artists featured include Kat Lyons, Edalia Day, Rebecca Tantony, Alice Humphreys, Liv Torc, Yvonne Reddick, Helmie Stil, Helen Johnson, Sarah Tremlett, Sarah Wimbush, Isobel Turner, Edson Burton, Michael Jenkins, Pierluigi Muscolino and Francesco Garbo. Followed by a discussion and Q&A with Sarah Tremlett and Lucy English of Liberated Words.

In registering for the event, I found that I had to use a UK postcode — your mileage may vary. Get your free ticket here.

Submissions open through May 31 for Weimar Poetry Film Award 2021

6th Weimar Poetry Film Award banner

It looks as if I might’ve neglected to post the original call-out for the 6th Weimar Poetry Film Award. It’s here, but I’ll paste it in below as well:

Through the Weimar Poetry Film Award the Literary Society of Thuringia and the Weimar Animation Club 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 10:00 mins, which explore the relation between film and written poetry in an innovative, straightforward way. Films that are produced before 2018 will not be considered.

The competition »Weimar Poetry Film Award« is financed by Kulturstiftung des Freistaats Thüringen and the City of Weimar. The competition is part of the »International Poetry Film Festival of Thuringia«.

From all submitted films selected for the festival competition three Jury members will choose the winner of the main awards (Best Animation, 1200 €; Best Video, 1200 €). Moreover, an audience award of 250 € will be awarded.

Dates & Deadlines

  • November 1, 2020 – Opening Date
  • December 31, 2020 – Earlybird
  • May 31, 2021 – Regular Deadline
  • July 16, 2021 – Notification Date
  • September 25, 2021 – Award Ceremony

 

Form for submissions [pdf] by e-mail to info [at] poetryfilm.de

Cadence: Video Poetry Festival 2021 debuts online on April 16

Cadence Video Poetry Festival

Tickets to the fourth annual Cadence: Video Poetry Festival are now available and the festival starts on Friday, April 16 and runs through Sunday, April 25. All tickets are sliding scale and all screenings will be available throughout the 10-day festival.

Cadence: Video Poetry Festival, presented by Northwest Film Forum, programmed in collaboration with Seattle author Chelsea Werner-Jatzke and artist Rana San, is a series of screenings, workshops, and discussions on the genre of video poetry, during National Poetry Month.

Cadence approaches video poetry as a literary genre presented as visual media that makes new meaning from the combination of text and moving image. Featuring screenings, an artist residency, generative workshops for youth and adults, and juried awards, the festival fosters critical and creative growth around the medium of video poetry.

“One thing that really impressed us about the submissions pool,” Chelsea and Rana told me in an email, “was how many of the video poems were made in the last year—it’s so impressive and encouraging to see artists creating amid the complicated tumult of our time.”

Festival Highlights

The Uncanny Intermingling showcase will feature a collaborative video poem by participants in the festival workshop, Animated Poetry with Neely Goniodsky, set to Anastacia-Reneé’s poetry currently featured in the exhibition, Anastacia-Reneé: (Don’t Be Absurd) Alice in Parts through April 25 at the Frye Art Museum.

Natachi Mez, NWFF’s 2020 Cadence Artist-in-Residence, completed her residency virtually in 2021 and the resulting video poem will be featured in (and provides the titular line of) the This Is How I Excavate showcase.

Award winners have been selected by guest judges: Nico Vassilakis (Adaptations/Ekphrasis), Caryn Cline (Collaboration), Catherine Bresner (Video by Poets), and Roland Dahwen (Poetry by Video Artists), and Moss Literary Journal (Northwest Artist Award). Submissions in the Wild Card category are judged by Festival Co-Directors Chelsea Werner-Jatzke and Rana San.

Festival Program

Included in Festival Passes:

Escribimos/We Write by Juan Bullón et. al.

An exemplary anthology videopoem from Seville-based poetry filmmaker Juan Bullón’s creative writing workshop. Be sure to click the CC (closed captioning) icon if you need the English translation (which is very good). As Juan told me in an email last November:

This year, with some of the students from my Creative Writing workshop, we decided to create a single piece, and although the stories that each one recites are more or less different, I think it can be seen as a single work made up of a few very personal poems and stories. Besides, all the authors are in the video, we all act. Another bet we made was to use as few verses or words as possible of what each one had written on the image, trying not to be so graphic so that the image and text could walk in parallel instead of chained.

The poems and authors in order: DICEN/THEY SAY by Juan Bullón; ESFINGE NEGRA/BLACK SPHINX by Carmen R. Hiraldo; DE CÓMO UN GRAMÁTICO APENADO SE QUEJA DESATENTO/HOW A SAD GRAMMARIAN COMPLAINS DISTRACTED (COOL) by Carmen Galeto; MAULLIDOS Y ESPANTOS/MEOWS AND HORRORS by Manuel Rodríguez de los Santos; SABER/KNOWING by Pedro García Ordiales; and ÚLTIMO DESPACHO/LAST DISPATCH by Juan Bullón. To read the original texts, go here, and for the translations, go here.

Scratching at the Surface of Tears by Jill Munro

Filmmaker Karen Dennison writes in a blog post,

As part of Abegail Morley’s series of posts on The Poetry Shed on the theme of Unlocking Creativity, I compiled a film as a prompt with a call out to poets to respond. Jill Munro wrote a fantastic poem in response and here is the resulting film poem.

Click through for the text of the poem and a short biog of Munro.

Call for entries: 2021 Film and Video Poetry Symposium

screenshot of 2021 film and Video Poetry Symposium website

The L.A.-based Film and Video Poetry Society’s 4th annual symposium is open for submissions from “Poets, Writers, filmmakers, animators, video and digital artists, media and performance artists.”

The symposium celebrates and will screen a large scope of film and video projects developed primarily through the medium of poetry.  FVPS2021 will host a series of panels, guest speakers, workshops, and public dialogues regarding film and video poetry throughout the course of the symposium. In addition to the screenings programmers also curate a 30-day gallery exhibition.

There are no restrictions regarding total running time of films submitted. There are no restrictions regarding when the film was produced or if the film has premiered regionally or internationally. There are no restrictions on subject matter, theme, topic, or language of origin.

The Film and Video Poetry Symposium calls for poetry films, filmpoems, digital-poetry, poetry video, Cin(E)-Poetry, spoken word films, videopoema, visual poetry, choreopoems, poetrinca, media poetry, and all films and video that are driven by onscreen text.

The Film and Video Poetry Symposium also excepts and supports experimental film and video work that explores language and/or literature whether it be oral, written, visual, or symbolic. This includes non-narrative work and the avant-guard. We strongly consider work that challenges traditional and current visual communication methods while continuing to function as a mode for exploring narrative forms and personal expression.

The Film and Video Poetry Symposium also calls for essay film, works of epistolary cinema, animation, choreopoems, performance art film and video, episodic content, oratorical works, documentary, video art, media art and installation, works created through immersive technologies, and episodic programming. Please see categories below for more details.

The deadline is September 4 and the submission fee is $20 per film, video, or media project. Click through for descriptions of each category and additional vital details, as well as the submission form and payment button.

You Still Have Something of The Ghost About You by JinJin Xu

For International Women’s Day, here’s a cento videopoem by JinJin Xu 徐今今, a poet and filmmaker from Shanghai. Here’s the Vimeo description:

The cento-film “You Still Have Something of the Ghost About You” was shot in the hauntingly empty casinos during the COVID-19 pandemic in Macau, China after I left mandatory government quarantine and realized I’d stumbled into the underworld. The polyvocal collage slips the viewer into an otherworldly, post-COVID globalized hypnosis: interweaving strangely prescient texts from Chinese and Western epics such as Dream of the Red Chamber, Journey to the West, Beastiary, Dante’s Inferno, and contemporary texts such as John Cage’s X, and Gu Cheng’s Ying’er, to journey into the afterlife of forgetfulness.

As a former comparative literature major, I love this blend! And I’m always excited to see up-and-coming poets integrating filmmaking into their practice. Xu’s bio notes that after getting her BA at Amherst College, she “traveled for a year as a Thomas J. Watson Fellow recording docu-poems with women dislocated across nine countries.” She’s currently in the MFA program at NYU, and her chapbook There Is Still Singing in the Afterlife just came out in November, after winning the inaugural Own Voices Chapbook Prize from Radix Media. Be sure to follow her on Vimeo.

Arrival at Elsewhere (extract) by Karen Dennison, Carl Griffin et. al.

A filmpoem by Karen Dennison, who also supplied the voiceover. The text was written by Jemma Borg, Annie Butler, Kerry Darbishire, Catherine Fletcher, Bashabi Fraser, Carl Griffin, Philip Gross, Chrys Salt, and Alina Stefanescu. Here’s the YouTube description:

Arrival at Elsewhere is a book length long poem response to the pandemic, curated by one poet, Carl Griffin, but written by 97. This is an extract from the book. It’s published by Against the Grain poetry press and available to buy at https://againstthegrainpoetrypress.wordpress.com/arrival-at-elsewhere/

From the description at that link:

Poets from across the world speak in one voice in response to 2020’s life-changing pandemic. Not a definitive voice, nor an authoritative one. But a contrasting, contradicting, confused voice, set both in the UK and everywhere else, represented by one narrator who, just like the rest of us, is made up of a hundred different people. A narrator cohesive only in his/her/their contemplation of Elsewhere.

REELpoetry/HoustonTX 2021 begins February 24

I’ve been remiss in so much lately, but especially in reporting on the various online poetry film festivals here. In part, this is because my own internet connection isn’t really up to the challenge of taking in such things. But if you’re fortunate to live somewhere with better WiFi, you don’t want to miss the REELpoetry festival, 24-28 February. Check out the full and varied program (and note that all times are in GMT -6). In addition to screenings of the competition films, there’s an interview with Sarah Tremlett, author of a forthcoming book on the poetics of poetry film; a selection of films from Scotland’s StAnza International Poetry Festival; two fabulous multi-filmmaker projects, Chaucer Cameron’s Wild Whispers and Lucy English’s Book of Hours; and more. As their official description notes, “REELpoetry is a dynamic 5 day curated international festival featuring collaborations among filmmakers, poets, musicians and artists to create poemfilms and videopoetry […] screening short pieces from 26 countries and 68 creatives including 9 from Houston. Networking opportunities in real time each day, interactive workshops, talks, Q&A.” Check it out.

Call for Papers and Presentations: MIX 2021

Via their website:

Are you interested in the future of content publishing? Are you a writer, artist, technologist or researcher engaged in finding new ways to tell stories to new audiences? Are you keen to hear from people working across books, digital, sound, video, AR, VR, and games? MIX 2021 offers an opportunity to join us as we think about the future of content creation and publishing.

MIX is a four-day virtual conference that explores the intersection of writing and technology, bringing together people from around the world to make, think and talk. We are looking for writers, artists, practitioners, researchers and creative technologists to share their projects, research and practice through papers or presentations.

After the success of the last five MIX conferences, held across our Bath Spa University campuses, the conference returns in a fully virtual form with an increased focus on making alongside two of our other favourite activities, thinking and talking. We will be hosting two days of making on Saturday 3rd July and Sunday 4th July followed by two days of papers, presentations and discussions on Monday 5th July and Tues 6th July. This includes poetry film screenings on the theme of Amplified Voices curated by Adrian B Earle from Think/Write/Fly and Sarah Tremlett from Liberated Words.

Read the rest.

Call for Submissions: HaikuLife Haiku Film Festival

via press release

The HaikuLife Haiku Film Festival invites your participation for its seventh year of screening short and intermediate-length films featuring haiku and related genres. These films generally fit one of four categories: video haiga, free format (more than one poem, generally, or haibun), feature format (longer, and perhaps featuring story arc beyond the poems themselves), and HaikuLife format, our homegrown approach with a set of parameters followed close or loose (see the introductory film at the link above). We prefer .mp4 but can generally convert if necessary. Haiku may be in any language, with or without English subtitles or accompanying translations. We look forward to sharing your work with our worldwide audience.

Submissions to: jim.kacian@thehaikufoundation.org