~ festivals and other screening events ~
News about any and all events in which poetry films/videos are prominently featured, whether or not they include an open competition. Please let us know about any we might miss. And don’t forget to check out our page of links to poetry film festivals. All festivals, events and calls for work are mentioned by MovingPoems 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.
ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival program is online
The ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival posted their program to the web yesterday, and judging from Google Translate, there’s a great deal of continuity with past festivals despite the change in hosting organizations (from Literaturwerkstatt Berlin to Filmwerkstatt Münster), as well as some interesting new features. The international competition drew more than 1100 submissions from 86 countries, from which the nominating committee selected 80 films for the competition. There are also new competitions for German-language films and films from the North Rhine-Westphalia region. Six films were chosen for screening from the 20 submitted in response to the festivalgedicht (festival poem), “Orakel van een gevonden schoen” by Mustafa Stitou.
Every ZEBRA festival includes a focus country or region; this year it’s Flanders and the Netherlands.
With selected poetry films from this year’s submissions, award-winning classics and the results of the Master Class ‘Poetry across the borders,’ ZEBRA presents the variety of that language area between dunes and polders. The emphasis will be supplemented with poetic readings and exciting film talks. [via Google]
As for the master class,
The joint workshop of the Filmwerkstatt Münster and Filmwerkstatt DZIGA in Nijmegen (NL) allowed two participants from both countries the production of a poetry film. The group met regularly for working meetings under the direction of filmmakers Rainer Komers and Bea de Visser. The focus of all films are the poems of the Dutch poet Frouke Arns, who had presented her texts in person at the first meeting in Nijmegen. Duringn July and August, the filmmakers and directors Victorine van Alphen, Ruut van der Beele, Christian Fries and Sina Seiler gave visual expression to each one of the featured poems. [via Google]
And there’s much more going on during the four-day festival — click through to read the whole program.
4th Ó Bhéal Poetry-Film Competition releases shortlist, screening date
Earlier this week, the folks at Ó Bhéal, in partnership with the IndieCork Festival of Independent Film & Music, posted the shortlist for their 4th Poetry-Film Competition, and announced that the screening will take place on October 16.
The competition shortlist of 28 films will be screened in two parts, at the Blacknight Festival Centre, Kino Cinema on Washington St (see map beneath this programme).
The films were chosen from 163 submissions from 28 countries, completed in the last two years. This year the shortlisted entries represent fifteen countries: Ireland, USA, Australia, UK, Germany, Spain, Belgium, Ukraine, Canada, Israel, Italy, Estonia, Finland, Belarus and Portugal.
The 2016 Ó Bhéal judges, poet Kathy D’Arcy and filmmaker / CEO of Film in Cork Rossa Mullin, will select one overall winner to receive the IndieCork festival award for best poetry film.
Click through to read about the shortlisted films. Congratulations and best of luck to all the filmmakers!
Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival Releases the 2016 Shortlists
The Longlist for the 2016 Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival is now up! In addition, finalists for the Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival are now up and public — these are the front-runners in this year’s poetry movie competition, the best of the best films submitted, and the finalists whose work will be screened at the 2016 Awards Ceremony and Viewing Party.
The Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival is a competition meant to highlight poetry and visual art at the intersection of film. The festival, due to take place in Worcester on October 22nd, 2016 focuses on short films that illustrate original poems, all of which are non-performance based (read: no footage of the poems being performed). This year Rabbit Heart received over 350 submissions from 39 countries, across 6 continents – and the top of the crop will be screened right here in Worcester, MA. The shortlists can be viewed at the Doublebunny website by choosing Shortlists 2016 from the dropdown menu for Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival.
Rabbit Heart will be awarding $800 prizes in seven categories this year: Best Overall Production, Best Animated, Best Music/Sound, Best Smartphone Production, Best Under 1 Minute, Best Valentine, and the Shoots! Youth Prize. The gala awards ceremony and viewing party will be at Nick’s Bar in Worcester, MA on the evening of October 22nd.
About Doublebunny Press:
Doublebunny Press is a small independent press that serves the New England area through poetry design, layout, and production of fine books and posters. Doublebunny also supported Omnivore Magazine, a poetry and arts monthly which, during its three-year run, published poetry and articles by over 150 authors, and carried a national subscription base.
Doublebunny has a history of great spoken word events in Worcester. They combined forces with The Worcester Poets’ Asylum to present V Day to the city in 2002 and 2003, and the Individual World Poetry Slam in 2005. In 2014, Doublebunny brought the inaugural Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival to the city, and in 2016 they plan an even more exciting show for Worcester, inviting the imagination of poets and filmmakers to once again take center stage.
About Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival:
Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival is the only outlet in North America for poetry on film in 2016, and the only festival that asks that the author of the poem participate in the making of the production. Rabbit Heart has attracted international attention over the last two years, including the honor of a showcase in the CYCLOP festival in Ukraine in 2014, and in 2015 and 2016 films from the festival have been featured at the pro.l.e series in Barcelona, Spain. This year Rabbit Heart received submissions from 41 countries over 6 continents, and the judges are currently in the thick of stellar work!
Once again Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival has been honored with a grant from the Worcester Arts Council (This program is administered by the Worcester Arts Council, for the Local Cultural Council – an agency supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency).
Save the date for Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival 2016: October 22nd. Tickets are now on sale online at http://doublebunnypress.storenvy.com/
Tickets for the 2014 and 2015 festival sold out very quickly – Doublebunny is expecting high demand again in 2016.
To learn more about this event, please go to www.doublebunnypress.com and click on the menu link to Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival. You can also visit Rabbit Heart on Facebook to check out news about poetry in film, and fun weekly featurettes like the 100 Delightful Things in Worcester Project.
Motionpoems’ Season 7 poetry films to premiere in October
https://vimeo.com/98679430
Autumn in the northern hemisphere usually brings the highest concentration of poetry film festivals and screening events worldwide, and this year, Motionpoems is set to join the fray, with the long-awaited world premiere of their Season 7 films to be held on October 27 in Minneapolis. (There’s also a Rooftop Sneak Preview scheduled for October 20.) Visit splashthat.com to reserve your tickets.
Motionpoems is the world’s only poetry film company. For our seventh season, we’ve partnered with Cave Canem to produce a series of films based on fantastic poems by Black poets. We’ll premiere them for the first time on October 27 at the Walker Art Center Cinema (1750 Hennepin Avenue), and we want to see you there. NOTE: There are TWO showings: One at 6pm and one at 8pm. Reserve your seats today for a $10 donation! They go fast!
This does mean that it will conflict directly with the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in Münster (October 27-30), where I’m sure at least a few of Motionpoems’ films will be screened.
Kickstarter to support video, dance and text installation “Digitized Figures”
Last summer I shared a video called Portlet from the on-going collaboration between dance and video artist Kathleen Kelley and poet Sarah Rose Nordgren—their Digitized Figures project. Now they’re preparing the world premiere of an interactive installation, and they’re asking for a little help.
The Campaign
Hello All! — We’re Kathleen Kelley and Sarah Rose Nordgren, a dance choreographer/media artist and poet who make up the collaborative team Smart Snow.
This campaign is raising money for a new performance installation that we’ve been developing for the past two years. Digitized Figures will have its world premiere at the Vanderbilt Republic’s gorgeous Gowanus Loft in Brooklyn, NY, and will be performing this fall 2016 from Friday October 14 – Sunday October 16 and Friday October 21 – Sunday October 23. (See the Facebook event page for tickets and details!).
Your support is absolutely crucial to making this ambitious new work possible. Our $5,000 Kickstarter goal reflects only about 25% of the funds it will take to present this piece at the Gowanus Loft. Your contributions will go directly to covering the project’s production needs which include (but are not limited to):
- renting necessary equipment such as projectors, monitors, and speakers
- hiring our production team (technical director, stage manager, production assistants, projection designer)
- paying our dancers
- hiring a costume designer
- supporting our press, publicity, and marketing efforts
Whether you can contribute $1 or much more, we are incredibly grateful for your support in bringing Digitized Figures to fruition!
The Work & Collaborators
Kathleen Kelley and Sarah Rose Nordgren have been collaborating formally and informally for 17 years, ever since they met each other at a party in high school and recognized each other as artistic soul-mates.
Since then, Kathleen has gone on to perform internationally as a dancer and to produce many live performances and dance films, and Sarah Rose has become an award-winning poet and writer. However, this will be their first large-scale performance and video installation they’ve produced as a collaborative team!
Digitized Figures will be the culmination of years of conversations and shared ideas between the two artists. As women working at the intersections of art and technology, both Kathleen and Sarah Rose share an interest in the mirrored relationship between technological and evolutionary processes, and the “natural” and the “human” inside of digital spaces.
In our commitment to create art that pushes the forms of dance and poetry into new technological territories, Digitized Figures introduces a completely new form which we call “choreographed text.” This form, in which text moves and “dances” across the screen, invites the viewer into a new relationship with language itself, presenting it as digital material saturating the performance environment.
We created the text, video, and choreography for Digitized Figures over a period of months through our artistic correspondence, sending lines of poetry, movement, and notebook sketches back and forth between New York and Cincinnati that eventually became the three core videos in Digitized Figures. Along the way, we’ve had the chance to present bits and pieces of the installation as a works in progress at various venues in Cambridge, MA, Brooklyn, NY, Iowa City, IA, Cincinnati, OH, and Montclair, NJ. We’re so excited to take what we’ve learned from these smaller showings and finally create the fully realized version of the installation with the addition of interactive video, four live dancers, and a completely new component that allows viewers to impact the performance through the use of tablets.
What a fascinating collaboration! Click through to read the rest, view all the images, and of course to donate if you can.
Call for submissions: 5th International Video Poetry Festival in Athens
From The +Institute [for Experimental Arts] website, here’s the announcement of the fifth annual poetry film.video festival in Athens:
The +Institute [for Experimental Arts] and Void Network
present
the 5th International Video Poetry Festival 2016
Winter 2016
at Free Self-Organised Theatre EMBROS / Athens / GreeceThe yearly International Video Poetry Festival 2016 will be held for fifth time in Greece in Athens. Approximately 2500 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 2016 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) from the incomes of the bar of the festival. All the participating artists and the organizing groups will participate voluntary to the festival. This year is the first time where it will be a submission fee for the participation to the festival in order to cover the expenses of the festival. The submission fee is 5 euro for the participation. Each artist can send more than one work. (1 to 3 video poems)
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.
Please click through and scroll down for information on how to submit. The deadline for submissions is November 20, 2016.
(And thanks to the festival organizers for their kind words about Moving Poems, by the way. It’s always a pleasure to help spread the word about events showcasing poetry films and videos—the more innovative and eclectic, the better.)
Call for poetry films: Festival Silêncio 2016
The Festival Silêncio is coming to Lisbon at the end of June, and they’ve issued a call for poetry films to be screened during the festival. You can download PDFs of the guidelines and submission form at this link. They’re looking for films in either Portuguese or English (or with subtitles in one of those languages), up to five minutes long. The deadline for submissions is June 19.
[Update 6/6] Festival organizer Alexandre Braga sent along a plain-text version of the guidelines. I’ll paste them in below.
Guidelines
Festival Silêncio will take place between June 30 and July 3 at Cais do Sodré, Lisbon.
Festival Silêncio is the word celebration! It is a popular and transdisciplinary event that celebrates the power of words to stimulate, inspire and enhance the artistic creation, cultural reflection and collective participation. In this context, the Festival holds a Poetry Film cycle which includes a competitive section and a non-competitive section.
Poetry-film is an artistic genre that combines words, sound and vision. As stated by Alastair Cook (2010), “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”. The competing films must use cinematic language to convey a poetic narrative.
DATE AND LOCATION
Between June 30 and July 3, 2016, in Lisbon.
ADMISSION REQUIREMENTS
- Poetry films with a maximum 5-minute duration are eligible for selection.
- There are no restrictions regarding genre, theme or approach.
- The films may be inspired by canonical poems or original poems.
- Films with incorporated voice or text and whose original version is not Portuguese should have English or Portuguese subtitles.
- There is no age limit.
- Each participant can present an unlimited number of films.
- Registration is not admissible for commercially distributed films.
REGISTRATION
- Film registration is free of charge;
- Registrations end in June 19, 2016;
- To register a film, the following elements are to be sent:
- the link to the visioning copy (youtube, vimeo). Other platforms may be accepted only if a minimum visioning quality is ensured;
- the film’s synopsis (max. 400 characters);
- the author’s biography (max. 200 characters);
- other relevant materials, such as film posters;
- duly completed registration form.
Registration documents must be sent to poetryfilm@ctlisbon.com
TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS FOR SELECTED FILMS
Film copy (MP4 format | H264 in 1080p or 720p HD), with a maximum 5-minute duration, with English or Portuguese subtitles or dialogues.
JURY / SELECTION PROCESS
The selection jury will be appointed by the organization and its task will be to select the works to be presented.
The selection of films will take into account three categories:
- Best National Poetry Film
- Best International Poetry Film
- Public’s Selection
COPYRIGHT
Intelectual property and copyrights of the films being submitted to competition are to remain with the director. By signing the registration form, the participant declares that he or she is the author of the films being submitted and copyright holder. The participant has full responsibility for any dispute on a work’s originality and/or the ownership of the aforementioned rights. For all legal intents, every author has full responsibility on the films that he or she registers. Festival Silêncio will decline any responsibility with regard to third parties.
FINAL PROVISIONS
By registering his or her name at the Competitive Exhibition of Festival Silêncio the participant agrees that it may be fully or partially reproduced in any further locale or event related with Festival Silêncio.
Call for submissions: 4th Ó Bhéal International Poetry-Film Competition
The Ó Bhéal website’s poetry-film competition page has just been updated with the details of the 2016 competition.
Submissions are now ÓPEN for the 4th Ó Bhéal International Poetry-Film Competition
(open for entries: 1st May – 31st August 2016)
in continued association with the IndieCork festival of independent film and music.
This is Ó Bhéal’s seventh year of screening International poetry-films (or video-poems) and the fourth year featuring an International competition.
Up to thirty films will be shortlisted and screened during the festival, during early October 2016. One winner will receive the Indie Cork / Ó Bhéal Poetry-Film prize, selected by this year’s Ó Bhéal judges, to be announced soon.
Deadline for submissions is the 31st of August 2016.
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.
You may submit as many entries as you like. Films must interpret, be based on, or convey a poem and have been completed no earlier than the 31st August 2014. They may not exceed 10 minutes in duration. Non-English language films will require English subtitles.
The final programme (shortlist) will be available here by the end of September.
Shortlisted films may also appear in Ó Bhéal programmes at various film festivals, to date including the Clare Island Film Festival and Cyclops festval in Kiev. They are also screened throughout the year, each Monday before Ó Bhéal’s weekly poetry event.
Click through and scroll down for the previous years’ winners. Best of luck to all who enter!
Timeline: a poetry film event in Manchester on 29 March
Tickets are now available for an evening of poetry films in Manchester next Tuesday, March 29, presented by the filmmaking group Bokeh Yeah!.
Bokeh Yeah! the Manchester based filmmaking group presents an evening of poetry film produced for the Timeline Poetry Film Challenge in association with Manchester Literature Festival and local publishers Carcanet Press, Flapjack and Commonword. The project helps Bokeh Yeah! members adapt poems provided by the publishers into short films using DSLR cameras. Publishers and filmmakers from across the region were invited to take part in the 2016 challenge, widening the opportunity for creative collaboration. This screening includes all of the films created for the challenge.
Event details
This screening will be accompanied by live poetry readings from Dave Viney and Helen Tookey.
An award will also be presented for the best poem film. The independent judging panel will include Zata Banks, poem filmmaker and founder of the PoetryFilm project, poet and Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester, Vona Groarke, and Michael Symmons Roberts, poet and Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Book tickets here, or see the event listing on Facebook for more information. This isn’t the first “Timeline” event that Bokeh Yeah! has sponsored, though I notice that the list of co-sponsors no longer includes Comma Press, which used to be a major player in the Manchester poetry-film scene ten years ago. It’s good to see other local publishers also taking an interest in poetry film.
Submissions Open for the Third Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival
Press release from 29 February. (I was on the road.) Dear other poetry film festival organizers: Please send me press releases like this one, OK? —Dave
WORCESTER, MA – Doublebunny Press announces today that submissions have opened for the third Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival.
The Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival is a competition meant to highlight poetry and visual art at the intersection of film. The festival, due to take place in Worcester in October of 2015 focuses on short films that illustrate original poems, all of which are non-performance based (read: no footage of the poems being performed).
As well as a $200 prize for Best Overall Production, Rabbit Heart will be awarding $100 prizes in six other categories: Best Animated, Best Music/Sound, Best Smartphone Production, Best Under 1 Minute, Best Valentine, and the Shoots! youth prize. The gala awards ceremony and viewing party will be at Nick’s Bar in Worcester, MA on October 22nd.
About Doublebunny Press
Doublebunny Press is a small independent press that serves the New England area through poetry design, layout, and production of fine books and posters. Doublebunny also supported Omnivore Magazine, a poetry and arts monthly which, during its three-year run, published poetry and articles by over 150 authors, and carried a national subscription base.
Doublebunny has a history of great spoken word events in Worcester. They combined forces with The Worcester Poets’ Asylum to present V Day to the city in 2002 and 2003, and the Individual World Poetry Slam in 2005. In 2014, Doublebunny brought the inaugural Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival to the city, and in now for the third year’s festival, they plan an even more exciting show for Worcester, inviting the imagination of poets and filmmakers to once again take center stage.
About Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival
Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival is one of very few outlets in the US for poetry on film, and the only festival that asks that the author of the poem participate in the making of the production. In 2014 and 2015 Rabbit Heart attracted international attention, including not only European submissions, but the honor of a showcase in the CYCLOP festival in Ukraine and showings in Barcelona, Spain at pro.l.e.
This year Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival has been recognized with a grant from the Worcester Arts Council. Here’s the official language: This program is administered by the Worcester Arts Council, for the Local Cultural Council – an agency supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency.
Submissions are now open for the 2016 Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival, and will remain open through July 1st.
To learn more about this event, please go to:
www.doublebunnypress.com and click on the menu link to Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival
Call for entries: Weimar Poetry Film Prize
The Weimarer Poetryfilmpreis or Weimar Poetry Film Prize is a new venture associated with the same people who run the excellent, bilingual website and magazine Poetryfilmkanal (Poetryfilm Channel). The three-person jury consists of ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival director Thomas Zandegiacomo Del Bel, poet Nancy Hünger and experimental filmmaker Hubert Sielecki. Here’s the English portion of the call for entries:
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
Through the new Film Prize, backup_festival and Literarische Gesellschaft Thüringen e.V. (LGT) 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 8:00 mins, which should explore the relation between film and written poetry in an innovative, straightforward way. Films that are produced before 2013 will not be considered. From all submitted films selected for the festival competition three Jury members will choose the winner of the main prize (1000 €). Moreover, an audience award of 250 € will be awarded.
The competition »Weimar Poetry Film Prize« is financed by Kulturstiftung des Freistaats Thüringen, Thüringer Staatskanzlei and the City of Weimar.
Entry deadline: March 15th, 2016.
Form for submissions [pdf] by mail or e-mail.
The »Weimar Poetry Film Prize« call for entries is international. For the submission send with the other informations a quotable text of the related poem in German or English.
Presentation of awards: May 21th, 2016.
More information about the program: www.backup-festival.de.
