Posts By Dave Bonta
Open call: Maldito Festival de Videopoesía 2024
Spain’s MALDITO FESTIVAL DE VIDEOPOESÍA has just announced open calls for its International Videopoetry Contest (short films) — guidelines here [PDF] — and its International Poetic Film Showcase (medium- to full-length films) — guidelines here. Maldito is
an international videopoetry contest that has been held in Albacete (Spain) since 2017.
MALDITO FESTIVAL launch this contest with the purpose to show two disciplines that, either individually or collectively, are much more isolated and forgotten as we would like. According to our experience, these disciplines are considered marginal and minor in the extent of the great European capitals, moreover, in the humble towns within regional borders where its dissemination is nonexistent.
MALDITO seeks to vindicate video poetry as an art that connects people, transmits feelings and stimulates different ways to see the world. It is also a tiny contribution of enormous people to empower visual art, stopping it from being marginal and damned*.
(* The Spanish word for damned is MALDITO).The festival is organized by non-profit Association Cultural Maldito; formed by a small team of professionals from the film industry, poetry and culture in general.
MALDITO Crew, as lovers of poetry, image and the expressive possibilities of its symbiosis, we pick up the baton and propose to continue the line of action, encouraging their approach to the public, either with the festival events or the educational activities that we carry out.
The festival will be in November 11-17. The deadline is July 10.
Tasting Notes by Matthew Stewart
This is one of the best, most satisfying films based on a poetry collection that I’ve seen. It was made in 2013 in support of a pamphlet (chapbook) of the same title from Happenstance Press. The poems are clearly differentiated, yet blend pretty seamlessly into a whole, with shots of the poet in a vineyard as part of the connective tissue. British poet Matthew Stewart collaborated with Spanish filmmaker José María Fernández de Vega of GLOW production company in Extramadura, where Stewart works in the wine trade. It’s hard to imagine a more poetic vocation! And since the speaker in each poem is a different variety of wine, and they’re all delivered in the poet’s own voice, it’s as if we’re hearing missing metamorphoses out of Ovid.
A while back I compiled my Top Ten Multi-Poem Films and Videopoems. This would certainly have occupied a prominent position in the list had it been available at the time. Conservative as the choice of images is, they rarely feel overly obvious. And Stewart’s voiceover is well done: readerly, but with excellent cadence and modulation. I’d have preferred somewhat less melodic music by way of contrast, but otherwise there were no false notes for me among these very tasty words and images.
Fuck / Our Future by Inua Ellams
A video made for some kind of climate series at The New York Times, locked behind the paywall, I think. My request for clarification on filmmaker(s) has gone unanswered, but it seems the result of a collaboration with the photographer named at the beginning, Josh Haner, a Pulitzer-winning feature photographer for the paper. Ellams himself also works in graphic art and design. I like how the poem’s searing language is mediated by the intimate space of an online reading, giving way to natural places and a more-than-figurative tree of life.
Earlier we shared a film by Jamie McDonald for the title poem from Ellam’s 2020 collection The Actual, among several other video interpretations of Ellams’ work. It’s fascinating to see giant legacy media organizations like the NYT and the Financial Times promote Ellams’ poetry, almost as cover for their ceaseless promotion of the planet-destroying financial and military/industrial machines.
The Lines by Andrew Motion
Suzie Hanna just uploaded to Vimeo this 2001 animation she co-directed with Hayley Winter. Live images and straight recordings interact with artifice at all levels, borrowing elements from glitch art and concrete text experiments. The former UK poet laureate Andrew Motion supplied the poem and reading, and Sebastian Castagna composed the soundtrack.
The Lines, a poetry animation, was selected for numerous festivals including Manchester Poetry Festival and Hamburg Animation Festival, it was part of a programme curated by the British Council ‘Shooting Rhymes and Cutting Verses’ which was shown all over the world to promote UK Culture. The Gene used it as visuals for a concert tour and it was shown in cinemas as part of the Sonimation project which was instigated by Suzie Hanna in collaboration with Sonic Arts Network and Digital Arts Network in 2001.
We’ve shared Hanna’s work often here. The bio on her website is worth quoting in full:
Suzie Hanna is Emerita Professor of Animation at Norwich University of the Arts. She was Chair of NAHEMI, the National Association for Higher Education in the Moving Image from 2016-2019, and remains an honorary member of the executive. She is an animator who collaborates with other academics and artists, and whose research interests include animation, poetry, puppetry and sound design. She has made numerous short films all of which have been selected for international festival screenings, TV broadcast or exhibited in curated shows. She contributes to journals, books and conferences, and has led several innovative projects including animated online international student collaborations and digital exhibitions of art and poetry on Europe’s largest public HiDef screen. She works as a production consultant and as an international academic examiner, was a member of the AHRC Peer Review College from 2009-2014, and is a longstanding member of ASIFA. She plays the violin and the musical saw.
All will be well by Jane Lovell
A new videopoem from UK poet Jane Lovell and artist Janet Lees, using some stunning underwater footage from Janet’s recent trip to the island of El Hierro in the Azores. Here’s how she captioned it on Instagram:
Feeling very muted going into this new year, hard to feel hopeful. I think this short videopoem holds a sense of solace. A deceptively simple poem by Jane Lovell, containing beautiful images and word-music, combined with footage I shot in the incomparable island of El Hierro recently, notably at Cala de Tacorón, a transformative place. I usually go for the lateral rather than the literal when putting film and poetry together, but somehow in this instance a straight translation between the elements felt right. This is part of an ongoing collaboration between the two JLs
Music is by The Duke of Norfolk.
Moment by Matt Dennison
A new film by Marc Neys, with music of his own composition, for the poem ‘Moment’ by Matt Dennison. Marc used the U.S. Army’s footage of an atomic bomb test, leaning into the distressed quality of the film stock digitized by the Prelinger Archive.
I See My World Shaking by Yuyutsu Sharma
This 2021 documentary poem by UK-based director Stephan Bookas uses a text from Nepalese-Indian poet Yuyutsu Sharma to portray the horror and aftermath of the 2015 earthquake with an intensity that would be hard to mimic in a standard narrative short.
Sharma is the first Nepalese poet we’ve featured on Wikipedia, and he has a fascinating background. Wikipedia notes that
In 2016 he published Quaking Cantos, a collection inspired by the 2015 Nepal earthquakes featuring Sharma’s poetry and photographs by Prasant Shrestha. In the Kathmandu Tribune, Arun Budhathoki wrote that it “immortalized the tragic event and captured the bitter memories of the Himalayan on a grand scale”. Andrea Dawn Bryant called it “stunningly heart-wrenching, albeit healing”.
a beach scene from ostend by Mola Clay
Mola Clay is the creative duo of film-maker and musician Yannick Mosimann, and vocalist and lyricist Selina Brenner, both in Switzerland. This recent video from them contains a deeply touching, poetic reverie, spoken by Brenner. Mosimann’s flickering images are ghostly, suggesting forgotten memories. The voice is calming in its subdued softness, in a soundtrack with silences, where intimacy is felt.
Mosimann’s brilliant earlier film Mrs. Bovary de Porrentruy was a couple of weeks ago awarded the international prize at Zebra Poetry Film Festival in Germany. His film-maker’s voice in both films is distinct and affecting.
From Selina Brenner’s bio…
Selinas work is transdisciplinary and interweaves art forms like music, dance, performance art and visual arts using the body, words/poetry, field recordings, song elements paired with extended vocal techniques and live electronics. Works are inspired by human behavior and perception, nighttime and feeling home, handled in a raw and expressive matter… Selina grew up in Maryland (USA) before moving to Switzerland when she was 12 years old. Selina has been living and working in Berne since 2016. (source)
Upcoming poetry film festival programs now online: Vienna, Midwest, Zebra
Autumn is a busy time in the poetry film world, especially when the biannual Vienna Poetry Film Festival, AKA Art Visuals & Poetry Filmfestival, is happening. It’ll be held on November 14-17 this year. Here’s the full program.
Highlights of this 10th anniversary edition of the festival include a poetry film competition based on the festival poem “la luna” by Viennese poet Manfred Chobot, with seven selections from around the world, and of course the main competition program, which is split into two sessions: one for Austrian films, and the other for German-language films from Germany and Switzerland.
A few days after that program appeared online, the Midwest Poetry Video Fest organizers uploaded detailed programs for their two-day event in Wisconsin, USA:
There will be two evenings of live Poet + Filmmaker performance followed by film screenings on October 14th and October 15th at ALL in Madison, WI and at Woodland Pattern in Milwaukee, WI. Each evening’s screening will be unique and will include a selection of works from the open call alongside works by artists especially invited by the Curatorial Team.
Each date links to a program, including thumbnails and a description of each of the 29 videopoems.
And then today the big dog, Berlin’s ZEBRA festival, announced its program. The English-language version is here, using what looks to be a repurposed URL from 2022. Each time it has a different national focus, and in 2023 that’s going to be Italy:
With selected poetry films from this year’s submissions, as well as the best Italian films of the past years, ZEBRA will present various facets of Italy film and poetry scene. Landscape, love, culture, tradition, and conflict are just a few of the themes. Films in this program are based on poems by Dante Alighieri, Gioacchino Belli, Elena Chiesa, John Giorno, Giacomo Leopardi, Milena Tipaldo oder Lello Voce.
For the international competition, they note that
About 1,200 entries from over 90 countries were submitted to 2023’s ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival. A program committee nominated 25 of them for the international competition.
The three-member international jury will award the following prizes this year: the “ZEBRA Prize for the Best Poetry Film,” donated by the House of Poetry, the “Goethe Film Prize – Borders,” donated by the Goethe-Institut, and the “Ritter Sport Film Prize,” donated by Alfred Ritter GmbH & Co KG.
There are also four thematically grouped programs, or prisms as they call them: The Worlds inside your mind – MEMORIES & DREAMS; All the What-Ifs – ECO POETRY & DYSTOPIA; Urbanities – CITY & SOCIETY; and How to connect – LOVE & BODIES. A couple of readings, a masterclass on animation, and the awards ceremony round out what looks like a very full and exciting program.
If any Moving Poems readers are planning to attend these events, we’d love to hear they went. Feel free to send in any reports or observations you may have.
Careful What You Wish For Orangutan by Pete Mullineaux
Pete Mullineaux won the 2023 Poetry & Folk In The Environment competition sponsored by UK performance-poetry organization Home Stage with this highly entertaining video, a collaboration with Roj Whelan AKA The RoJ LiGht of RoJnRoll Productions in Dublin, who handled the camerawork and editing.
