~ contests ~
We strive to link to as many poetry film/video contests and calls for entries as we can. (See also the festivals category.) Please let us know about any we might miss.
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.
Two calls for submissions: Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival and Art Visuals & Poetry Festival
A new poetry film festival is slated for Worcester, Massachusetts, USA: the Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival, sponsored by Doublebunny Press. The screening is in September, submissions are open until June 1, and — unusually for a poetry film festival — there’s a $25 submissions fee, and six winners will get cash prizes: “Best Overall Picture will win $200, and there will be $100 prizes in categories for Best Animation, Best Music in a Video, Phone Shot, Under 1 Minute, and Valentine.”
Two other unique features of this contest and festival: they want only what I would call videopoetry or filmpoetry — no footage of the poet herself reading her work, and they’re looking for author-made films, requiring the poet to be “directly involved in the process of making the video.” Also, judging is blind, so the film can’t contain any credits. All in all, this is definitely one of the most unique poetry film festival call-outs I’ve seen. Check it out.
Another poetry film festival is scheduled for November in Vienna, Austria. The Art Visuals & Poetry Festival has been going on for several years now, and its website is a good source for information on various film festivals and poetry film-related activities, especially for those who read German. The 2014 festival includes an international competition using a recording of a poem by Georg Trakl as well as a competition for Austrian filmmakers. The deadline is September 30.
The Austria-specific contest is for what they call a textfilm. In contrast to the Rabbit Heart folks, they cast a pretty wide net:
Whether abstract, classic, animation, narrative or cinematographic : the genre of poetry film is colorful and varied. There are also many definitions. The Scottish photographer and filmmaker Alistair Cook defined the poetry film recently with the following words: “A poetry film is… a single entwined entity, a melting, a cleaving together of words, sound and vision. It is an attempt to take a poem and present it through a medium that will create a new artwork, separate from the original poem.” In contrast to the Anglo-American world, we accept all kinds of literary art works, that meet the predicate literary. It can be abstract sound poem or poetic prose or naughty poetry slam. Therefore we sometimes use the word “textfilm” as a synonym for the word “poetry film”.
Anyway, do read their call for entries.
Don’t forget that the main Moving Poems links page includes, as its last category, a nearly complete list of international poetry film festivals. For recent festival news and call-outs, browse the “festivals and other screening events” topic here at the forum.
New at Awkword Paper Cut: videopoetry contest and a feature on Melissa Diem
Belgian videopoet Marc Neys, A.K.A. Swoon, is behind two features this month at the online magazine Awkword Paper Cut. His monthly column “Swoon’s View” focuses on two films by Irish poet and filmmaker Melissa Diem (also a favorite here at Moving Poems), balancing his critiques with Diem’s own notes about the making of each. It’s always interesting to hear someone who has achieved mastery both as a poet and as a filmmaker describe their creative process. Here, for example, is Diem discussing the second of the two films:
The poem, Appraisal, came about by exploring ideas of alienation and personal identity in relation to others through testing the physical and social world we find ourselves in and by testing the limits within the self. And of course these worlds in turn test us, sometimes relentlessly. It was this aspect of the poem that I wanted to explore in the poetry film. The initial idea came about organically when I was doing a quick frame rate test and Cayley (the little girl in the film) happened to be dancing about the room. We were only half paying attention to each. When I played back the footage I was moved by her expressions, the concentration playing across her face at certain times, her earnestness and innocence as she focused on positioning her small limbs in certain movements. It was that innocence against the great expansiveness of life rushing towards us, with its many tests, that I wanted to capture.
Also this month at Awkword Paper Cut, submissions are open for a unique writing contest: they’re looking for “500 words or less of prose, poetry, or flash fiction to match the video by award winning filmmaker Marc Neys (aka Swoon).”
The submission that best suits the video by Swoon will be selected by a panel of seven judges to be recorded, added to the video and showcased on Awkword Paper Cut including airplay on our Podcast! In addition, the winning submission will also receive membership to The Film Movement’s Film of the Month Club – Offering some of the finest independent filmmaking available! ALSO…Top selection along with runner ups will be featured on the Awkword Paper Cut Podcast!
Here’s the video:
Who wouldn’t want a chance to collaborate on a new videopoem (or videoessay, etc.) with Swoon? Submit by March 31. Details here and complete guidelines here.
“Shot Through the Heart”: a poetry film competition from Southbank Centre
London’s Southbank Centre is holding a love-themed poetry film competition with Alastair Cook, Thomas Zandegiacomo Del Bel and Malgorzata Kitowski as judges.
Shot Through the Heart – Southbank Centre Poetry Film Competition
Friday 14 February – Friday 30 May
Calling all poets and filmmakers! Love is in the air at Southbank Centre and we want you to create poetry films that explore the joy of first love, the pain of lost love, the confusion of displaced love, the purity of platonic love, or any other kind of love.
There are two categories to enter:
Poetry films on the theme of love made for adults
Poetry films on the theme of love made for children (under 12)
Throughout the summer, Southbank Centre’s celebrates the Festival of Love. Our biennial Poetry International festival (17 – 24 July 2014) explores many different themes including the various ways in which love can impact on writers’ lives. Poetry film will be a major part of this year’s Poetry International.
A poetry film can be many different things, as Alastair Cook, Filmmaker and Director of Filmpoem Festival in Dunbar, explains –
‘A poetry film is… a single entwined entity, a melting, a cleaving together of words, sound and vision. It is an attempt to take a poem and present it through a medium that will create a new artwork, separate from the original poem.’
Dates:
Shot Through the Heart Competition opens: Friday 14 February 2014 at 12noon
Shot Through the Heart Competition closes: Friday 30 May 2014 at 6pm
Prizes:
Southbank Centre is very keen that each submission is seen as a collaborative artwork between poet and filmmaker, so this prize is awarded jointly to the winning poet and filmmaker in each category. Poems must be by living poets and follow the copyright guidance and rules here.
Poetry films made for adults:
• Shortlisted films will be shown in Purcell Room at Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, on Friday 18 July 2014 and all shortlisted filmmakers will be invited to the screening. The winner and a runner-up will be announced on the night.
• The winning film will receive £500 to be shared between poet and filmmaker as well as a pair of tickets each to Poetry International’s Gala Reading.
• The runner-up poet and filmmaker will receive a pair of tickets each to Poetry International’s Gala Reading.
Poetry films made for children:
• Shortlisted films will be shown in The Clore Ballroom at Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre on Saturday 19 July 2014. The winner and runner-up will be announced on the night.
• The winning children’s film will receive £500 to be shared between poet and filmmaker as well as a pair of tickets each to Poetry International’s Gala Reading.
• The winning film will also be shown in Imagine Children’s Festival 2015 headlining a children’s poetry film event – this is one of our busiest festivals, attracting thousands of audience members every year.
• Both winning films will be shown at 2014’s ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in Berlin.
2014 Visible Verse Festival open for submissions
The leading videopoetry festival in North America, Visible Verse, takes place in Vancouver every fall. Heather Haley, the organizer, messaged me on Facebook to let me know that they are already open for submissions again. Here’s the call from their new website:
Call for Entries and Official Guidelines:
- VVF seeks videopoems and poetry films with a 12 minute maximum duration.
- Works will be judged by their innovation, cohesion and literary merit. The ideal videopoem is a wedding of word and image, the voice seen as well as heard.
- Please do not send documentaries as they are outside the featured genre.
- Either official language of Canada is acceptable, though if the video is in French, an English-dubbed or-subtitled version is required. Videopoems may originate in any part of the world.
- Please submit by sending the url/link to your videopoem for previewing to VVF Artistic Director Heather Haley at: hshaley@ emspace.com along with a brief bio and contact information. If selected, you will receive notification and further instructions.
- There is no official application form nor entry fee.
2014 Visible Verse Festival will take place in October
Submission deadline: July 1, 2014
Two other international poetry film festivals are also currently open for submissions: the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in Berlin (deadline: 25 April) and The Body Electric Poetry Film Festival in Fort Collins, Colorado (deadline: 16 February).
If you organize, or simply know about, other poetry film festivals and contests, please contact me when they open for submissions so I can help spread the word.
Call for submissions: 7th biannual ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in Berlin
I’m a little late in sharing this announcement, but the 2014 ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival is open for submissions:
For the seventh time, the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival is calling for entries to find the best poetry film. Entries may be short films made on the basis of poems. The total value of the prizes in the competition is € 13,000. From among the films submitted, a Programme Committee will nominate the films to be entered for the Competition and select the films for the various sections of the festival programme. The winners will be chose by an international jury.
The Festival is also inviting entries of films based on this year’s »Festival poem«, Love in the Age of the EU by Björn Kuhligk. The directors of the three best films will be invited to Berlin to meet the poet and have the opportunity to present and discuss their films. You can find the poem with a sound recording and various translations here.
Closing date for entries for all the competitions is 25 April 2014
See the complete call for entries [PDF].
New Motionpoems project: “Arrivals & Departures at Saint Paul’s Union Depot”
Motionpoems and public artist Todd Boss present “Arrivals & Departures at St Paul’s Union Depot,” a colossal 3D poetry film installation that will magically transform the facade of one of St Paul’s most impressive landmark buildings.
The plan is to:
- select a handful of original poems by Minnesotans (theme: “Arrivals & Departures”) from a statewide call for poems (see GUIDELINES below),
- commission Minnesota film teams to turn finalist poems into short films to fit digitally mapped 3D templates of the building,
- project the films onto the screen-filled facade of St Paul’s historic Union Depot at 5-minute intervals like trains, with accompanying audio from lawn-area speakers, during the St Paul Art Crawl, October 2-4, 2014.
The artistic vision for this project is to celebrate Union Depot’s renaissance as a rail hub with an act of locally sourced meaning-making that will reclaim the space in the hearts and minds of all who experience it.
They need a lot more backers, though, so please consider making a contribution to the Kickstarter campaign.
It’ll be huge. Five poems. Five films, departing every 5 minutes like trains, looping till late-night during the Saint Paul Art Crawl, when thousands of art-lovers already flock to Lowertown.
I’m a passionate evangelist for poetry, and I believe that our public spaces could be more “poetic.” This project is not about me or my poet friends. It’s about inviting everyone to write a poem, and sharing those poems (in film!) with the community.
Swoon film “Drift” wins Trevigliopoesia Festival contest
Congratulations to Mark Neys, A.K.A. Swoon, for winning the sixth edition of “La parola immaginata,” the poetry-film contest associated with the Trevigliopoesia Festival in Italy, with his film Drift. It features a poem by the Irish poet Paul Perry, “For two NATO soldiers who drowned in an attempt to recover supplies from a river in the province of Badghis, Western Afghanistan, November, 2009.” As regular followers of this site know, Swoon’s videopoetry is a particular favorite around here, though honestly, all nine of the finalist films seemed deserving to me. (Thank god I wasn’t one of the judges!) With 65 films in the Moving Poems archive — and I don’t even post everything he uploads to Vimeo — Swoon is without a doubt one of the most productive filmmakers in the poetry-film world. Given that, it’s impressive that his films are also of such high quality, as the jury at Trevigliopoesia recognized.
Upcoming poetry film festival deadlines
2013 may be an off-year for ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival, but that doesn’t stop them from promoting other people’s festivals on their Facebook page. A recent posting listed all the upcoming deadlines for submission — something we should do here more often, as well:
- FilmPoem Festival in Dunbar, Scotland
DEADLINE: July 1, 2013 - DOCtorCLIP Roma Poetry Film Festival
DEADLINE: July 30, 2013 - Liberated Words Poetry Film Festival in Bristol, UK
DEADLINE: July 30, 2013 - Visible Verse Festival in Vancouver, BC
DEADLINE: August 1, 2013 - Ó Bhéal International Poetry-Film Competition 2013 in Cork, Ireland
DEADLINE: September 15, 2013
The first of these, you may recall, I have some connection to as one of the directors, and I will be attending the festival in August. More about that at a later date. For now, I just want to stress that filmmakers should read the guidelines carefully. Unlike many other festivals, we only consider submissions sent via post: on a DVD, CD or memory stick, and only in .mov or .m4v form. Alastair Cook says: “We’re receiving some great poetry-film from all corners of the world. And we are so pleased to be able to screen it! Now organising the events and workshops for the festival, so pleased to have such an amazing historic venue in such a beautiful town.”
For a more comprehensive list of regular and recent poetry film festivals, see the Moving Poems Links page.
Call for submissions: Ó Bhéal International Poetry-Film Competition 2013
Ó Bhéal (Irish for by word of mouth) is a weekly poetry event in Cork which, since 2010, has also been sponsoring an annual screening of poetry films and videopoems from around the world. This year they’re taking it to the next level, associating with the IndieCork festival of independent cinema in October and holding a poetry-film competition. View the complete guidelines at their website. Here’s the meat of it:
We are now open for submissions. Thirty films will be shortlisted and screened during the IndieCork festival. One winner will be selected by the Ó Bhéal jury.
Deadline for submissions is the 15th of September 2013.
Entry is free to anyone, and should be made via email to poetryfilm [at] obheal.ie – including the following 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 2011. They may not exceed 10 minutes in duration. Non-English language films will require subtitles.
“Films based on youth writing” sought for the Poetry Projection Project
In line with Moving Poems’ focus on children’s poetry films this past week, here’s a call for entries for films based on poems by children and youth:
The Poetry Projection Project: A WritersCorps Film Event
Entry Deadline: March 1, 2013, 11 p.m. PST
Screening: April 2013 (date & location TBA)The Poetry Projection Project is an annual video contest held by WritersCorps, an award-winning creative writing program for youth. WritersCorps calls on filmmakers and video artists of all ages to create work based on youth writing. Videos will be screened at an event during National Poetry Month in April 2013 and online at WritersCorps.org.
WritersCorps will award three $250 cash prizes:
One prize to the best film made by an adult age 23 and over
One prize to the best film made by a young person age 17-22
One prize to the best film made by a young person age 16 and underEntries will be juried by special guest juror, filmmaker H.P. Mendoza.
In keeping with WritersCorps’ mission of helping youth through creative expression, the Poetry Projection Project engages filmmakers to explore the power of young people’s words and voices.
Click through for the guidelines.
(h/t: ZEBRA Poetry Film on Twitter)
Looming deadlines: litlive.ca videopoetry contest (July 1) and Co-Kisser Poetry Film Festival (July 3)
Don’t miss two great opportunities to showcase videopoetry/filmpoetry, both from the frozen north. The Canadian Review of Literature in Performance, litlive.ca, is paying actual money for three winners of its inaugural videopoetry contest. Entries may originate from any part of the world, but must be received no later than July 1. Meanwhile, the Co-Kisser Poetry-Film Festival is in its second year of hosting
an annual Poetry-Film Festival at Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Co-Kisser is a local Minneapolis arts organization, but our festival showcases poetry-films from Minnesota and all over the world. The festival has open submissions and we’re looking for films that are inspired by poetry, based on poetry, and about poetry and poets. Live action, animation, short and feature films share an evening with live poetry readings, Q&A with filmmakers and poets, and live music.
Submissions are due by July 3. Here are the guidelines.
