All festivals, events and calls for work are mentioned by Moving Poems with our best efforts and in good faith. However, do check all details yourself as we cannot guarantee accuracy, and make your own judgements because we cannot verify the things that we share. Events may fail for a variety of genuine reasons, or may be a scam to elicit fees.
We are pleased to announce that we are accepting submissions for the MIX 2025 conference, Writing with Technologies, starting on Wednesday the 2nd of July 2025 at Bath Spa University’s Locksbrook Campus.
Now in its eighth year, Bath Spa University’s MIX has established itself as an innovative forum for the discussion and exploration of writing and technology, bringing together researchers, writers, technologists and practitioners from around the world to make, think and talk.
As part of our programme, New York Times bestselling writer and publisher Michael Bhasker, currently working for Microsoft AI and co-author of the book The Coming Wave: AI, Power and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma, will appear in conversation.
Themes for this year’s discussions include:
Issues of trust and truth in digital writing
The use of generative AI tools by authors, poets and screenwriters
Debates around AI and ethics for creative practitioners
Emerging immersive storytelling practices
Interested in joining us?
We are looking for proposals for either 15 minute papers or presentations or 5 minute lightening talks from technologists, artists, writers and poets working in the digital realm as well as academic researchers and independent scholars. We are particularly interested in the work and views of creators, audiences and communities currently underrepresented across writing and technology.
This will be a boutique version of MIX, with ticket numbers limited to 70.
The 12th International Video Poetry Festival will take place in Athens at Fri. 11 and Sat. 12 April 2025. The festival attempts to create an open public space for the creative expression of all tendencies and streams of contemporary visual poetry. The IVPF has been around since 2011. It is one of the largest international platforms for video poetry. Every year, it offers poets, film directors, video artists and festival makers from all over the world a platform for creative exchange, brainstorming and meeting with a broad audience. Poetry readings, live performances, concerts, retrospectives, exhibitions, performances, workshops and lectures showcase the diversity of the genres of video poetry and spoken-word music.
The International Video Poetry Festival happens in two different zones. The first day is the Show Room Video Poetry, a unique cinema hall zone that will include video poems, visual poems, short film poems and cinematic poetry and performances by artists from all over the world (America, Asia, Europe, Africa). The second day is the Live Performance Zone with multimedia poetry readings, concerts of experimental music, workshops and spoken word lives.
Poets, filmmakers, video and digital artists, media and performance artists are called to submit creative works to the 12th Annual International Video Poetry Festival in Athens, Greece. The festival celebrates and will screen a large scope of video projects developed through the medium of poetry. The International Video Poetry Festival will also host a series of panels, guest speakers, workshops, and public dialogues regarding film and video poetry. In addition to the screenings, programmers also curate a video art exhibition.
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 the language of origin. The International Video Poetry Festival will accept submissions of poetry films, filmpoems, digital-poetry, poetry video, Cin(E)-Poetry, spoken word films, videopoema, visual poetry, choreopoems, poetrinca, media poetry, and all films and videos that are driven visually by text or voice.
Live performances, video mapping, installation proposals, and grand-scale video art presentations that contain strong aspects of poetry are encouraged. The IVPF also calls for experimental film and video work that explores poetry or literature whether it be oral, written, visual, or symbolic. This includes non-narrative work and the avant-garde.
The IVPF strongly considers artwork that examines and challenges traditional visual communication methods while continuing to function as a tool for exploring poetry. The International Video Poetry Festival will consider documentaries that focus on poets, poems, poetry, poetic technique, literary movements, and historical events within these realms. The documentaries must have English or Greek subtitles.
The IVPF also calls for video work that explores poetry and literature whether it be oral, written, visual, or symbolic. This includes the film essay or cinematic essay, non-narrative work, and the avant-guard. We will also strongly consider work that challenges traditional and current visual communication methods while continuing to function as a mode for exploring narrative and personal expression.
Organizer and promoter of the International Video Poetry Festival are the Institute for Experimental Arts in co-operation with Void Network.
Awards & Prizes
Every year the committee of the Institute for Experimental Arts the 10 most outstanding video poems of the annual festival. Τhe committee is composed of the official member of the nonprofit cultural society Institute for Experimental Arts.
Rules & Terms
Deadline: All submissions must be submitted, emailed, or postmarked no later than 15 February, 2025.
One project title per submission form is allowed. All languages are allowed (including English or Greek subtitles)
Artwork based on poems and not longer than 20 minutes can be submitted. All languages are allowed.
From the submissions, a program committee makes the artwork selection for the festival program. A jury made up of representatives from the fields of poetry, film and media will select the video poems. The 12th International Video Poetry Festival will not offer notes or feedback on any submitted films or projects. No revisions will be accepted once an entry has been received. Once payment has been processed, IVPF will not provide a refund. All decisions made by the committee will be final, and no refund of the submission fee will be provided.
ALL ENTRIES must be subtitled in English or in Greek. In the event that the submitted project is accepted for inclusion within the 12th International Video Poetry Festival the submitter agrees to provide each of the following rights to The 12th International Video Poetry Festival without reservations, conditions, or qualifications: (a) the right to use footage, stills, and information from or relating to the project for promotional purposes (b) the right to issue and authorize publicity concerning the filmmakers and the project and to use all associated names, likenesses and biographical information.
The IVPF will announce the 2024 program selection in April 2025. The 12th International Video Poetry Festival will take place on April 11-12.
The International Video Poetry Festival is a project of the Institute for Experimental Arts in cooperation with Void Network in Athens / Greece. If you have any questions : theinstitutecontact(at)gmail.com
Process Submission Fee
Deadline for all submissions is February 15, 2025. The submission fee is 8 euros per video or media project.
If you want to propose us a performance, lecture or any other idea, you are very welcome to send them to the following email: videopoetryfestival [@] gmail.com
Somehow we missed the opening-date announcement back in July, but poetry filmmakers still have until February 25 to submit to the 2025 festival. Here’s the call-out:
Through the Weimar Poetry Film Award the Literary Society of Thuringia and the Weimar Animation Club are looking for innovative poetry films.
The aim of the award is to improve the exchange between authors and filmmakers in Thuringia and Central Germany, to sharpen the perception of poetry in multimedia contexts, and to create more awareness for the experimental short film genre »poetry film«.
The competition is part of the Poetryfilmtage (International Poetry Film Festival of Thuringia).
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 2022 will not be considered.
The Weimar Poetry Film Award stands for an independent and competent awarding process. The jury is international and consists of three jurors with expertise in the fields of poetry, film production or criticism, and festival organization. The competition films are nominated by a program commission. During the festival, the jury selects the winners of the Jury Prizes in the categories »Best Animation« and »Best Real Film«. Both awards are endowed with € 1,200. A €250 audience prize will also be awarded by the cinema audience.
The competition »Weimar Poetry Film Award« is financed by the State Chancellery of Thuringia, the Sparkasse Mittelthüringen, and the City of Weimar.
“Now accepting poetry films from all artists regardless of location for a screening in 2025 at the Millennium Film Workshop in Brooklyn, NY.
We aim to embrace the broadest possible definition of the genre and hope this screening will spark dialogue about the genre’s fluid boundaries and its spill into often mispronounced and unwieldy territories.“
Poetry filmmaker Charles Olsen is inviting international poetry filmmakers to help mark the 10th anniversary of a project he’s spearheaded called Given Words. As he explains in the CFW,
Given Words is a poetry competition run by me—artist, writer and poetry filmmaker Charles Olsen—for Aotearoa New Zealand’s National Poetry Day in August. Each year I present five words and poets (New Zealand citizens and residents, both adults and children) write poems including all five words. I have also been a judge of the Aotearoa Poetry Film Festival (2023) and the ekphrastic poetry film competition Frame to Frames: Your Eyes Follow (2022).
In the last three editions, the five words have been presented in ‘word videos’ made by students in Honduras, Spain, and Aotearoa New Zealand.
Here’s an example of a given words video from López de Arenas Secondary School, Marchena, Spain, used for the 2023 competition:
For the tenth edition of Given Words I would like to invite poetry filmmakers from around the word to collaborate by contributing very short—from 5- up to 20-second—’word films’, from which I will choose five to inspire the poets of the 10th edition of Given Words. My reason for asking established poetry filmmakers is I would like to use this platform to both demonstrate the possibilities of the audiovisual medium, and hopefully inspire experimentation, as well as young future poet-filmmakers.
In a way it is breaking down poetry film into its most basic element: how to convey a single word through moving image and sound. In selecting the five word films I will consider the poetic nature and originality of each piece, alongside the final combination of the five words.
What will you get out of this?
There are no prizes or laurels or festival screenings. If chosen, your word film will help to inspire around 250 poems by adults and children across Aotearoa New Zealand next National Poetry Day in August 2025. It is an opportunity to be part of this innovative project, and may also get you questioning the relationship between text, sound and image in your own work. You should also have fun!
I have run Given Words for nine years with prizes donated by New Zealand publishers, and a minimal seed fund towards judging fees. No fee is asked of participants, and many schools across Aotearoa New Zealand invite their students to take part. We will promote the results and the winner’s profiles on our social networks during the National Poetry Day celebrations.
Guidelines
Make a film that presents one word in an original poetic way. The word must be present visually, or in audio, or both.
Each film should be less than 20 seconds long.
You can choose any word. We usually choose a mix of nouns, verbs and adjectives. Words in languages other than English will need to be accompanied by the English translation.
You can submit as many word films as you like, although for the five words we will only choose one per filmmaker.
You may submit clips of your previous work if it fits the guidelines.
Please do not include credits or logos.
Submission is free.
By submitting you acknowledge that the work is yours, and that you have obtained permission(s) where required.
Email your word film, preferably as .MOV or .MP4, to nzgivenwords@gmail.com by 28 February 2025.
Include your full name, a brief bio (up to 80 words), links to your social media and website, and an English translation of the word where necessary.
By submitting your work you allow us to crop and edit the work, and present the work online. We will include the credit of your work.
Any questions can be addressed to Charles at nzgivenwords@gmail.com.
Click through to watch more videos from the project and check out the winning poems that these videos have inspired. It’s interesting to see videopoetry being used to spark further poems. That’s kind of as it should be, I think. Let’s end with the 2024 Given Words video:
REELpoetry/HoustonTX 2025 is open for submissions. The organizers say that “By popular demand, we’re extending the submission time to six months.” The festival will take place “online March 31- April 4; in person APRIL 5-6; with online workshops April 7-11.” They also note some other changes:
NEW! What could be better than videopoetry to engage coming generations of tech savvy youth. We’re delighted to support poets and filmmakers 18 and under at the festival with a new FREE “Young Creatives” program. If you’re a parent or a teacher, please encourage your kids to submit to this free program. See Rules & Terms for details specific to this program.
NEW IN 2025! We’re thinking about categories differently, and curious to see how one category where the poet and filmmaker are the same person and another where the poet and filmmaker are different plays out. Five notable international curators and presenters who have participated in our past festivals will be judging the submissions. They can’t wait to see your work!
8th Annual Cadence Video Poetry Festival, Still Image: “Adhan” (2023) by Kamyar Mohsenin
Now in its eighth year, Cadence Video Poetry Festival is open for submissions from July 1st 2024 through January 15th 2025. The hybrid festival, which features screenings, workshops and discussions on poetry film, will take place in person in Seattle from Apr 25–27 & online Apr 25 – May 4. Selected video poems receive an artist’s payment.
According to Rana San, Co-Director/Co-Curator of the festival, “Participation in Cadence is open to work that is new or old, short or epic, premiere or seasoned traveler. If it combines text and moving image, we want to see it!”
The festival’s description is worth highlighting:
“Video poetry is language as light. As an art form, video poetry is lucid and liminal—on the threshold of the literary and the moving image. It articulates the poetic image visually, rather than metaphorically—it shifts words from page to screen, from ink to light. A video poem makes meaning that would not exist if text was without image, image without text.”
Cadence also puts on a Virtual Poetry Book Fair during each festival, the most recent of which is still available online.
Cadence Submission Poster (2025)
Additionally, artists can also apply for the Cadence Artist-in-Residence program, which “provides resources and tools for the development of a new video poem to screen at the festival.” Launched in 2019 and open to Seattle-area residents, the program accepts applications from individual artists or collaborative teams. Those selected are granted access to the Northwest Film Forum’s film equipment and editing lab. The deadline for residency applications is December 15, 2024.
An online archive of selected award-winning videopoems from the festival is available on their website for those interested. However, screening the films requires ticket purchase from Northwest Film Forum’s Eventive virtual cinema. Some filmmakers recently selected for Cadence have made their work available on other platforms, such as “Only” (2023) a film by Maxine Flasher-Düzgüneş based on a Rebecca Foust poem, featured previously on Moving Poems.
The annual festival is organized by Chelsea Werner-Jatzke and Rana San and hosted at the independent film and arts nonprofit, Northwest Film Forum, founded in Seattle in 1995. Cadence has become a fixture on the video poetry festival circuit so send in your work!
I’ll illustrate this round-up with a trailer excerpt from a personal favourite that I saw this week from the online Juried Selections at REELPoetry Festival in Houston. I Dream my Dream by Monique van Kerkhof and Bo Oudendijk.
Dreaming about showing your work? From Australia to Mexico and other points in between, there are film festivals that are awaiting poetry films. Recent posts here on Moving Poems have included Drumshanbo, Resonans, and Maldito, and these are still open, as well as Midwest which was listed back in January.
In Australia there is a new poetry film festival to be held in conjunction with the Poets on the Mountain Festival and they are looking for Australian poetry films and Australian Bush Poetry films. Deadline 30 June.
La Poesia Che Si Vede is an international competition for poetry films based in Ancona, Italy. The organisers say that “poetry film for La Poesia che si vede is total poetry, without discrimination of genre or format”. Deadline 27 May.
Fotogenia in Mexico City has been running for 6 years. It has a varied programme that includes categories such as avant-garde feature films and video art, with a specific film poetry category. They do have a number of specific rules though – do check carefully. These include mandatory Spanish subtitles if your film is to be shown in the in-person screening, and that films cannot be shown online at any other public website. Deadline 31 July.
The 3rd Annual Drumshanbo Written Word Poetry Film Competition is now open for entries on Film freeway at https://filmfreeway.com/DrumshanboWrittenWordPoetryFilmCompetition Drumshanbo in County Leitrim, Ireland, a beautiful lakelands town hosts an annual literary festival in August. The festival brings together some of Ireland’s finest writers and poets. As part of this they host an annual poetry film competition open to all. Each year there is an evening where shortlisted films are screened as part of the opening ceremony.
Shortlisted films will be shown on Friday 23rd Aug 2024.
There will be a 1st Prize of €500
Films of up to 10 minutes are welcome.
A Copenhagen-based festival focusing on the poetics of nature and the environment is open for submissions.
RESONANS: A Fringe of Nature and Culture
(Previously known as the Nature & Culture International Poetry Film Festival)
This festival focuses on the poetics of nature and environment, and takes place annually in Copenhagen, Denmark (with headquarters in Sweden and Finland for smaller features) as well as an online festival which is of free access at poeticphonotheque.com during the festival dates.
The Organizers:
The Poetic Phonotheque started in 2020 as an audio collection of poetry from all over the world which now counts with over 500 adiovisual poems in all languages and an international permanent collection of poetry films. The Poetic Phonotheque is managed by Red Door Gallery in Copenhagen, which also counts with its own magazine www.reddoormagazine.com since 2009.
In 2021, Kulturhuset Islands Brygge (Copenhagen, Denmark) became the official home of the Poetic Phonotheque, to house its audio collection and launched a second round of poetry open calls to collect audio poetry recordings in every language with the theme of climate, sustainability, nature, and our planet’s preservation as the focus.
In 2021, Kultivera, a cultural organization in the city of Tranås, Sweden, also became headquarters of the Phonotheque for that country.
In 2022, the screening location of the festival was Husets Biograf, a cultural centre located at Rådhusstræ 13 in central Copenhagen, Denmark.
In 2023, Bokens Hus, in Turku, Finland, joins the team as Finnish headquarters, collaborators and mapping team.
In 2024, Empire Bio in Copenhagen joins as the screening location for the 4th edition of the festival.
We invite you to submit your films on this important subject, whether they’re animation, short film, poetry film, experimental, or documentaries. A focus on the NATURE & CULTURE (humanity’s connection with our environment) is encouraged.
Poetry films are invited to remain as part of the permanent video collection of the Poetic Phonotheque. We encourage BIPOC and LGBTQ+ creators to submit their work.
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.
It’s the New Year and perhaps a good time to be thinking about film festivals and competitions. Is this the year you will enter for the first time? Or to bring an, as yet, unseen project to light? Or to think about what new films you might create in 2024 …
But first, with a quick pause for thought (or maybe to take the actions suggested) – here is a throwback to a lovely little film posted on Moving Poems way back in 2012.
And now, here are the major festivals for poetry films coming up for entry (linked to their FilmFreeway page where you will find more details). Some were first posted earlier when the calls initially went out (but a reminder that the deadline is coming up closer), and others are fresh!
Cadence – deadlines 15 January / 5 February
Event: April, Seattle USA
REELpoetry – final deadline 22 January
Event: April, Houston USA
Remember to check all the rules of entry carefully to make sure you comply (or it is just irritating for the organisers), and make your own judgements on whether to enter. These are all established events, but be aware that there are some dodgy festivals out there that have little merit in getting your film exposed to an interested audience but will take hefty sums in entry fees.
No need to rush it either … festivals and deadlines are an ongoing roll, and if you miss one, there will always be another festival or another year that comes along. Often there is a long or an unlimited timeframe in which a completed film will be eligible, and no impact if you don’t get on the case immediately.
