~ calls for work ~
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.
Call for submissions: Film-poems at Lighthouse
An arts organization called Lighthouse in Dorset, UK issued a call for submissions back on July 3 which I only just became aware of (sorry!). The deadline is August 20th. They offer a poster version of their call as a PDF, but I’d prefer to share it in text form from their website:
Lighthouse is inviting submissions for an exciting new project highlighting film-poetry, a developing hybrid art-form that connects the apparently disparate worlds of the moving image and the written word.
Film-Poems are typically short, usually just two or three minutes long, featuring a voiceover or talking head and images that connect to the text in some way.
To be launched in October, Film-Poems @ Lighthouse will feature 24 short films to be screened over the course of a year in the Cinema at Lighthouse.
“It’s about exploring new ways of presenting poetry, moving poetry away from people’s expectations and reaching out to the YouTube generation – something to have fun with,” says Lighthouse writer in residence Simon McCormack.
Films can be lo-fi, shot on phones, or they might be packed with wild graphics. There can be a narrative flow or not, literal representations of the words, or something more abstract.
For this series we have chosen the theme of ‘performance’. We want entries to be as adventurous as possible with their interpretation. The idea of performance runs through our everyday experience – there’s the ballet dancer on stage, the paint applied to the canvas, the child carefully spelling a word, the lollipop man holding up traffic and music heard through an open window. Go to the people and places where you find performance and show them to us.”
Submissions guidelines:
Films must be no longer than three minutes.
In the first instance email a link to the entry to submissions@lighthouse.co.uk stating ‘Film-Poems’ in the heading.
Please include a paragraph or two about yourself in the main body of the email.
If accepted we will ask you to send a good digital copy.
By submitting you agree to Lighthouse showing your work in the Cinema. You retain full rights to the work.
The closing date for submissions in 20 August.
Call for Submissions: 4th International Video Poetry/Film Poetry Festival in Athens
The +Institute [for Experimental Arts] and Void Network have just issued a call for the 4th International Video Poetry Festival 2015, linking to guidelines which refer to it as the International Film Poetry Festival. Regardless of which name you use, the deadline for submissions is November 20, and this will be their fourth year of putting on an event which stands out from the crowd of international videopoetry/poetry film festivals for its street-wise style and anarchist philosophy:
The yearly International Video Poetry Festival 2015 will be held for fourth time in Greece in Athens. Approximately 2000 people attended the festival last years
There will be two different zones of the festival. The first zone will include video poems, visual poems, short film poems and cinematic poetry by artists from all over the world (America, Asia, Europe, Africa). The second zone will include cross-platform collaborations of sound producers and music groups with poets and visual artists in live improvisations.
The International Video Poetry Festival 2015 attempts to create an open public space for the creative expression of all tendencies and streams of contemporary visual poetry.
It is very important to notice that this festival is a part of the counter-culture activities of Void Network and + the Institute [for Experimental Arts] and will be non-sponsored, free entrance, non commercial and non profit event. The festival will cover the costs (2000 posters, 15.000 flyers, high quality technical equipment e.t.c.) from the incomes of the bar of the festival.All the participating artists and the organizing groups will participate voluntary to the festival.
Void Network started organizing multi media poetry nights in 1990. Void Network and +the Institute [for Experimental Arts] believe that multi media Poetry Nights and Video Poetry shows can vibrate in the heart of Metropolis, bring new audiences in contact with contemporary poetry and open new creative dimensions for this ancient art. To achieve this, we respect the aspirations and the objectives of the artists, create high quality self organized exhibition areas and show rooms, we work with professional technicians and we offer meeting points and fields of expression for artists and people that tend to stand antagonistically to the mainstream culture.
Click through for links to photos from past years as well as the guidelines.
Call for submissions: Motionpoems’ Big Bridges Film Festival
Five finalist poems have been selected for Motionpoems’ Big Bridges project, and now a second competition has been announced, this time to select films made from three of those poems. The deadline is August 10, so you don’t have very much time. Links to the poems and full details are on the Motionpoems website. I’ll quote the description from their email newsletter, which was more succinct:
CALL FOR FILMS: $2500 in Prizes
Motionpoems invites filmmakers to create short films designed to inspire engineers, architects, and designers with ideas for the future of big bridges. America’s bridges are failing, and Target Studio at the Weisman Art Museum of the University of Minnesota is stirring public conversation by mounting a multidisciplinary exhibit that dreams big about big bridges. A national poetry contest has resulted in five finalist poems on this theme; we’re making three of those poems available to develop into your own short film; you could come away with a share of $2500 in awards. The deadline is August 10, 2015. Click here to read finalist poems, read the guidelines and enter the contest.
The Big Bridges Film Festival will be held on September 30, 2015 at the University of Minnesota.
Motionpoems announce partnership with Cave Canem for Season 7, issue call for submissions
I was very interested to see this announcement in the sidebar of Motionpoems‘ latest email newsletter:
We’re excited to be partnering with Cave Canem as our exclusive content partner for next season! Founded in 1996, this organization is a home to the many voices of African American poetry. All of next season’s motionpoems will come from African American writers. If you’re a Cave Canem fellow, we want you to submit. Contact Cave Canem for more details.
As curator of Moving Poems, I’ve been frustrated with the relative scarcity of good poetry films and videopoems featuring the work of African American poets, though it’s offset to some extent by a proliferation of performance documentary videos. (And frankly, I might miss a lot because of my tendency to search Vimeo rather than YouTube.) So I am very cheered to learn about this. It seems like a logical development from Motionpoems’ partnership with VIDA for the current season to put a spotlight on women poets.
Submissions are open for 3rd Ó Bhéal International Poetry-Film Competition 2015
This week, the Cork, Ireland-based poetry organization Ó Bhéal, in association with the IndieCork festival of independent cinema, issued a call for submissions:
This is Ó Bhéal’s sixth year of screening poetry-films (or video-poems) and the third year featuring an International competition.
Up to thirty films will be shortlisted and screened during the festival, from 4th-11th October 2015. One winner will receive the Indie Cork / Ó Bhéal Poetry-Film prize, selected by this year’s Ó Bhéal judges:
Patrick Cotter and Padraig Trehy
Deadline for submissions is the 15th of September 2015.
Guidelines
Entry is free to anyone, and should be made via email to poetryfilm [at] obheal.ie – including the following info in an attached word document:
- Name and duration of Film
- Name of director
- Country of origin
- Contact details
- Name of Poet
- Name of Poem
- Synopsis
- Filmmaker biography
- and a Link to download a high-resolution version of the film.
Films must interpret or be based on a poem, and have been completed no earlier than the 1st August 2013. They may not exceed 10 minutes in duration. Non-English language films will require English subtitles.
The final programme (shortlist) will be available via both the Ó Bhéal and IndieCork websites as of the 30th of September 2015.
Hope to see you there!
2015 Art Visuals & Poetry Film Festival open to submissions from German-speaking countries
METRO Kinokulturhaus, Vienna
The Vienna-based Art Visuals & Poetry Film Festival has opened submissions to their 2015 competition — but only to residents of Austria, Germany and Switzerland, or filmmakers with citizenship in those countries. A more international “special prize” can’t be given this year for budgetary reasons, they say; focusing on the three German-speaking countries (rather than just Austria) for the main competition is therefore a compromise. (Or so I gather from Google’s not terribly adequate machine translation.) A grand prize winner will be awarded 400 Euros, and announcements of other prizes will be forthcoming.
The festival is also moving to a new venue this year: METRO Kinokulturhaus, “one of the most beautiful cinemas in Vienna.” An exact date has yet to be announced.
Submissions are through an online form, and the deadline is September 15.
Deadlines approach for Filmpoem Festival, ‘Bring a Poem to Life’ competition, and Rabbit Heart
Two calls for work previously announced here are closing in early May, while a third stays open until July 1, allowing a little more time for procrastinators (in whose company I proudly include myself). Those submission deadlines:
- May 1: Filmpoem Festival Fifteen
- May 5: “Bring a Poem to Life” competition for UK secondary school students
- July 1: 2015 Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival
In the much longer term, submissions to Carbon Culture‘s $1000 poetry film prize are open until January 1. But there’s been a little more information about it since I originally posted their call:
Zata Kitowski, director of PoetryFilm, will pick the grand prize winner and finalists. The winning entry will receive $1,000.00. The top five entries will receive high-profile placements across a number of networks, note in a one page ad alongside honorable mentions in our newsstand print and device editions. All entries are considered for sponsored entry to our list of film festivals and poetry film festivals.
And speaking of Zata Banks (née Kitowski), it’s worth pointing out that submissions to PoetryFilm never close — there’s no deadline whatsoever. Which does put us procrastinators in a bit of a bind.
Call for poems to be turned into films about “Big Bridges”
The Minneapolis-based poetry-film organization Motionpoems, in cooperation with the Weisman Art Museum of the University of Minnesota, is seeking submissions to a poetry-film installation called Big Bridges.
See your poem turned into a film! Calling all artists, designers, engineers, poets, and the entire community…Join us in a creative dialogue to establish the expectations, possibilities, and aspirations for the future of our Big Bridges over the Mississippi River. America’s bridges are failing. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, 25% of America’s bridges are structurally deficient or functionally obsolete.
To inspire future engineers, Motionpoems and Target Studio at the Weisman Art Museum of the University of Minnesota invite poets to dream big about bridges. We want poems to inspire our nation’s designers, engineers, and architects to reimagine the future of America’s big bridges. You might send us a poem that imagines a physical bridge of the future or one that conceptualizes the idea of bridging in a big way or you might send us a poem that reinterprets bridge-crossing for a new age. Broad interpretations of the theme encouraged. Executive director of the Poetry Society of America and former New Yorker poetry editor Alice Quinn will judge this poetry contest.
Five winners will:
- receive $1,000
- see their poems turned into short films
- see those films at the Weisman Art Museum
- receive airfare/accommodations to attend the premiere in Minneapolis (date to be announced).
The deadline for submissions is April 30, and only poets resident in the U.S. may enter. Click through and scroll down past the images to read the terms of entry. There will be a second call for entries, this time to U.S. filmmakers, at a yet-to-be-determined date after the five poems have been chosen.
Cambridge University Press sponsors poetry film competition for UK school students
British students between the ages of 14 and 18 are encouraged to “bring a poem to life” by making a poetry film. The contest pitch is aimed at teachers:
Encourage your students to enter our multimedia poetry competition for their chance to win some fantastic prizes.
Engaging students with poetry is often a challenging and difficult area of teaching English. To help you encourage your students to develop an appreciation of poetry, we invite your students (recommended for KS4 and 5) to enter our ‘Bring a Poem to Life’ competition, a multimedia approach to exploring and enjoying poetry.
How to enter
To enter, students must submit a ‘poem film’ with an audio recording of one of the poems below and film their own video clip or clips which will fit the mood, tone and meaning of the poem for a chance of grabbing a great prize.
Submissions can be from an individual student or a group of students (maximum five students per group). Students or teachers can choose from one of four poems from the current AQA Poetry Anthology ‘Moon on the Tides’.
The poems the students can work with include “The Charge of the Light Brigade” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “London” by William Blake, “The Farmer’s Bride” by Charlotte Mew, and “My Last Duchess” by Robert Browning. Author Trevor Millum is the judge. The competition is open to all UK students, recommended for KS4 and KS5, and closes on 5th May 2015. Click through for complete rules and guidelines.
Call for submissions: Usurp Zone5 Film Festival
London’s Usurp Art Gallery is planning a film festival this summer, and the call for entries explicitly mentions poetry films as one of the things they’re interested in. I also like the emphasis on films or videos made with little or no money:
Free submission!
Submission deadline: 20 April 2015
Festival dates: 17 July – 2 August 2015Usurp Zone5 – an eclectic festival curated by the Usurp Art Gallery that will showcase inventive work by low-budget / no budget film and video makers in a gallery setting.
Think – abstract, absurd, activist, animated, asemic, clandestine, collage, conceptual, cut-ups, environment, experimental, glitsch, graffiti, graphic, identity, kinetic, outsider, paracinematic, performance, plunderphonic, poetry, radio, rebellious, scores, sci-art, scratch, silent, sonic, subterranean, subversive, surreal, synesthetic, typographic, video art…This is a UK and International call out so show us what you have!
Usurp Art Gallery develops opportunities for creative and critical voices from the margins – open to experimental ideas in all media. The Usurp Zone5 Film Festival will also launch our Usurp Film Club.
Visit the festival website for submission forms and more.
Poetryfilmkanal website launches, issues call for essays to publish in magazine
After a slight delay from their projected February launch, the German website Poetryfilmkanal debuted this week, and I was happy to be able to add such a promising new site to the Moving Poems links page. Most of the content so far is in German, but it still has some useful features for Anglophone (and other) readers—especially the Calendar of world-wide poetry film events and the bibliography (Lektüretipps).
As the latter page suggests, this is a scholarly site. Here’s a machine translation from Google of the background page (Die Idee), edited for clarity:
Poetryfilmkanal—Poetry Film Channel—is an e-platform designed to carry ideas and information about the genre of poetry film. It was founded as a joint project between the Multimedia Narration degree program at the Bauhaus University Weimar and the Thüringen Society of Literature, incorporated [e. V.] by Aline Helmcke and Guido Naschert.
Examples of the cinematic adaptation of poetry, or poetic-associative design of short films related to poetry, can be found since the beginning of film history. With the advent of new media design options, a global poetry film movement has emerged in the last two decades. A growing number of festivals and contests, seminars, blogs and scientific publications have made for a confusing field. In addition, the standards by which poetry films are judged (and supported financially) are still very diffuse. The genre is often referred to, but without being explained – and misunderstood accordingly.
Poetryfilmkanal will supply information about this wild field, invite dialogue and contribute to the formation of concepts. With an international calendar of screenings and festivals (Calendar) and regular information on contests (Deadlines), ways to produce and view poetry films will become more transparent. Short articles showcase particularly valuable short films on a monthly basis (Film of the Month). Poetryfilmkanal also imparts basic knowledge of the history of poetry films (Timeline), shares references (Reading Guide) and tries to find a network of relevant web content (Links).
The core of the site is the Magazine that tracks the blog about three quarters of a year on a specific theme, before all the posts appear in an ePaper edition—just the Poetry Film Magazine archived. The editorial provides an introduction to the topic. Essayistic and literary texts in German and English will monitor the genre or introduce artists and authors. In addition, the blog will contain “excavations”: historical poetry films, interviews, festival reports and meetings. And an English translation of German contributions will be provided in the future.
This all sounds very ambitious. Two films have already been included in the Film of the Month feature, and the inaugural editorial, “Faszination Poetryfilm?” has been made available in English translation. I urge anyone with an interest in the genre to go read the whole thing; I’ll just quote the final two paragraphs:
We decided to open the blog’s discussion on a very general level in order to prepare the ground for more specific investigations in future editions. What makes an engaging poetry film? By which characteristics a poetry film is able to develop a certain fascination? Is there any general answer or do we have to look more precisely into the categories of live action and animation film? Are there certain sorts of poems which are particularly suitable for a translation into the audio-visual media? In which way do sound and voice-over determine the outcome? How come so many poetry films appear to only scratch the surface and fail to take us deeper into the meaning of the poem?
The discussion will consist of short blogs in an open form, about 3000-4000 signs in length. We will invite practitioners in the field to contribute their texts but encourage and welcome anyone interested to submit their own statement or opinion. By the end of this year, we aim at publishing the first edition of the Poetry Film Magazine from the texts and statements received.
We are looking forward to an engaging and lively discussion!
All the Best,
Aline Helmcke, Guido Naschert
Submissions are open for Filmpoem Festival Fifteen
Reprinted from the Filmpoem website. This is the Filmpoem Festival’s third year, and it’s great to see Alastair Cook’s vision for it continue to expand and adapt. Films aren’t static, so why should film festivals stay the same? Also, kudos for giving in to poetic temptation and embracing the f-alliteration. —Dave
Filmpoem Festival Fifteen will be an open-ended series of events and screenings. After our successful Antwerp festival in 2014, we are working within the British Isles this year with The Poetry Society and a series of universities and poetry festivals, presenting Filmpoem’s established mix of poetry-film, live film performance, poets, filmmakers, and discussions.
“The combination of film and poetry is an attractive one. For the poet, perhaps a hope that the filmmaker will bring something to the poem: a new audience, a visual attraction, the laying of way markers; for the filmmaker, a fixed parameter to respond to, the power of a text sparking the imagination with visual connections and metaphor.” Alastair Cook, Anon 7 (Edinburgh, 2010).
This wonderful hybrid artform has become a great new force in the worlds of film and poetry provoking a range of terminologies: filmpoem, videopoem, cinepoem and poetry-film each reflecting different origins and schools of thought.
SUBMISSIONS ARE NOW OPEN FOR THE GENERAL PROGRAMME
– Films should be no more than 15 minutes in length. If you have a particular film for consideration which is over 15 minutes, please contact us directly.
– The work should contain the full text of a poem or multiple, related poems, whether spoken or using visual text. Talking-head poems will be considered on merit but the poetry-film is a genre that encourages filmic exploration. Poetic film or poetry inspired film without words will also be accepted on merit, depending on relevance.
– Work outside the genre cannot be accepted.
– All submitted work not in the English language must contain English subtitles.
– Deadline for submissions is 1st May 2015
There are two ways to submit:
DIGITAL SUBMISSION
– Upload a screening quality copy of your film to http://vimeo.com. Ensure you set the privacy settings to password only and set the password to filmpoem15
– Email a digital copy of your biography, your full name and contact information to submit@filmpoem.com
PHYSICAL ARTEFACT SUBMISSION
– Send a screening quality copy of your film (Quicktime file – m4v or mov) on a USB stick or DVD. Please do NOT embed the film. DVDs are non-returnable but all USB sticks are returnable if you include a stamped addressed envelope.
– Include a digital copy of your biography, your full name and contact information to
Filmpoem Festival, 21 Cambridge Gardens, Edinburgh, EH6 5DH, UNITED KINGDOM
FURTHER INFORMATION
There is no entry fee.
All submissions will be considered as your screening copy so if the resolution is not sufficient, we will unfortunately not be able to screen your film.
We would encourage the use of original soundtracks wherever possible as no copyright material can be used without the express permission of the poet, musician, filmmaker and/or author.
We will consider your submission as granting us copyright permission to screen the film for the duration of the project and will retain your film for archive unless expressly instructed otherwise.
Many thanks and good luck!
Alastair
