~ 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.
Call for entries: OLE International Festival of Electronic Literature
A month-long International Festival of Electronic Literature—OLE—will be held in Naples and its environs in October. There is of course some overlap between videopoetry/filmpoetry and electronic literature; here’s how the festival website describes the latter:
Electronic Literature, also known as eLiterature or digital literature, includes a wide genre of works that make use of digital media (from the computer to the Internet to single software) to be created and / or to be used. It is therefore not about traditional works subsequently digitized, but born digital works that generate real new languages and, therefore, new literatures.
The festival is divided into two sections, one “made up of internationally renowned artists from all over the world,” and the other for younger artists. The call for proposals targets the latter group:
Present Call is addressed to young people of any nationality who are under 35 years of age. The theme of the Festival is “Memory of the future: to know ours roots to plan a common future”. The other sub themes are: “conditions for peace, sustainable development, knowledge and cultural diversity,” in parallel with the theme of Universal Forum of Cultures.
The works they’re seeking include:
2. ELECTRONIC POEMS
- videopoetry
- kinetic poetry
- interactive poetry
- 3D poetry
- multimedia poetry
- hypertext poetry
- flash poetry
- generative poetry
- code poetry
The deadline is May 15. Refer to the website for the rather complex submission procedures (which may be more comprehensible in Italian).
Visual, film, and sound artists sought for collaborative project with Minnesota poet
Duluth, Minnesota’s Prøve Collective (which counts among its members the cellist/composer and videopoem maker Kathy McTavish, whose work I’ve featured on Moving Poems) recently issued a rather unique call for artists to collaborate on multimedia projects with poet Kathleen Roberts, culminating in a two-week exhibition in August. Here’s the call as it appears on mnartists.org:
Accepting submissions of visual, film, and sound art for With Sirens Blaring. Deadline: July 1
Duluth’s Prøve Collective announces an open call to filmmakers and artists for its upcoming show, “With Sirens Blaring”.
Deadline: 1 July, 2014.
Prøve Gallery, Duluth, Minnesota’s independent and artist run contemporary gallery, is proud to announce “With Sirens Blaring”, opening 8 August, 2014.
Show Description: Poetry is, above all things, an attempt to view the world through language. This summer, Prøve Collective will display a body of work linking poetry to visual, film, and sound art. Pursuant to a grant from the McKnight Foundation, award-winning Duluth poet Kathleen Roberts is creating an assembly of films and artwork by local and regional artists based on her words. These works will be displayed permanently on her website and in Prøve’s August exhibition, “With Sirens Blaring”. Artists in all disciplines are encouraged to inquire.
Mission Statement: Prøve Collective is a cultural organization dedicated to the role of art exhibition as a conduit of powerful ideas and diverse viewpoints. Our mission is to foster a greater appreciation of the contemporary arts, to bridge cultures, to create and expand community, and to provide cultural exchange, networking opportunities, and educational outreach through regular interaction with the contemporary arts. It is the goal of Prøve Collective to present monthly gallery shows, collaborate with like- minded arts organizations, and provide an arts retail environment.
Submission guidelines:
Interested parties may contact Kathleen via e-mail at kathleen@provegallery.com. Please include a brief statement of purpose and Curriculum Vitae. These will be works of collaboration, and we are interested in sharing in your ideas about poetry and its intersection with other art forms.All submission materials must be written in English. Prøve Collective will provide publicity, exhibition invitations, mailings, and an opening reception. All work resulting from this project will be under Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY), which requires that anyone distributing this work or making derivative work must give attribution to the original artists.
Submission does not guarantee that your work will be displayed.
Please e-mail kathleen@provegallery.com if you are interested in participating in this moving poetry project.
Deadlines:
• Submissions are due by 1 July. As this collaboration will take time and communication, it will be necessary for artists to initiate contact well in advance of the deadline for submission.
• The opening reception for “With Sirens Blaring” will be 8 August from 7-11pm.
• The show will run for two weeks and conclude on 23 August.
• Pick up will be August 28-30 from 3-7pm.Please direct any questions to Kathleen Roberts, kathleen@provegallery.com.
PRØVE Gallery 21 North Lake Avenue Duluth, MN 55802 info@provegallery.com www.facebook.com/provecollective www.provegallery.com
ReVersed Poetry Film Festival 2014 set for first weekend in April
Working at break-neck speed, the organizers of the brand-new ReVersed Poetry Film Festival slated for April 4-6 in Amsterdam have scheduled a full program of screenings and events — it looks great. They even found time to make the above trailer. Timo Geschwill is the filmmaker, with text and voiceover by Daniel Vorthuys and sound design by Sinan Guven.
In other poetry festival-related news, Filmpoem has a slick new website — check it out.
Free, three-hour screening of filmpoems at Hidden Door Festival in Edinburgh, April 5
Hidden Door is a nine-day festival of art, music and poetry beginning on March 28 at Market Street Vaults, Edinburgh. It offers “FREE ENTRY to Exhibition Spaces, Project Space, Bars, Cinema” every day from noon to 6:00 PM, and this includes three, 40-minute screenings of filmpoems on the last day of the festival, April 5. Here are the details, according to the event listing on Facebook:
3pm -6pm: Alastair Cook and Luca Nasciuti are introducing, performing and talking about Filmpoem in the afternoon from 3pm – come and see previews of this year’s festivals, watch some beautiful films and enjoy the rest of the Hidden Door experience at a leisurely Saturday afternoon pace.
Filmpoem is dedicated to the filming of words and is a collaborative venture committed to attracting new audiences to new writing. Filmpoem at Hidden Door is a match made in filmic festival heaven – on Saturday April 5th, we will be bringing poets, films and performance to these great Edinburgh arches, running three forty-minute screenings:
3pm: Filmpoem Felix Screening – Curation from our archive mixed with sneak peaks at some of the work for Filmpoem in Antwerp on June 14th this year, in partnership with Felix Poetry Festival.
4pm: Filmpoem Live with Luca Nasciuti. Luca explores and performs filmic soundscapes with poetry film, with live readings.
5pm: Filmpoem Poetry Society, an exclusive curation in partnership with The Poetry Society
It’s part of a larger programme of films at the festival called Hidden Cinema — an enticing mix of animation, shorts and experimental film.
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.
Introducing Silicon Valley to the world of videopoetry
In her “Third Form” column in Connotation Press this month, Erica Goss reports on her experience introducing an audience of book-lovers to videopoetry. A number of towns and cities around the United States now have community book clubs. Silicon Valley Reads is one such program, and their theme for 2014 is “Books & Technology: Friends or Foes?” So Goss, as Poet Laureate of Los Gatos as well as videopoetry critic and connoisseur, gave a presentation one evening last month called “Off the Page.”
I selected nine video poems that I felt represented the art form well, but kept in mind the fact that most, if not all of the audience had never seen anything like this before. I wanted videos that were accessible, not too challenging, visually stunning, and that showed a variety of approaches: animation, archival film, and documentary-style, to name a few.
Goss also created a kinestatic video using a crowd-sourced collage poem with 100 lines contributed by local residents describing the changes in the Santa Clara Valley/Silicon Valley landscape. She showed that first, followed by the nine videos:
Some were newer and some were old favorites. The album is on Vimeo. In selecting these videos, I wanted them to flow from familiar film style (The Barking Horse) through archival film (Need) to animation (The Trees) and end on a high note (Danatum Passu). I added brief commentary to each video.
Many of the audience members wanted more information about making their own video poems, and wondered if there was a class they could take. This made me think that there might be a need for instruction outside of video poetry festivals. (Anyone want to help me design a video poetry course?)
It was gratifying to hear how well this program was received. There is of course no such thing as a typical audience, and residents of Silicon Valley might be especially atypical in some respects, but I think one of the great promises of videopoetry and animated poetry has always been this perceived potential to reach literate audiences who are not necessarily hardcore fans of contemporary poetry. That seems to have have happened in at least one American community last month. Check it out.
“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.
Filmpoem news: 2014 Festival in Antwerp (call out); feature in The Third Form; Hidden Door
The Filmpoem Festival, which debuted last August in Dunbar, Scotland, will be moving to Antwerp this year in partnership with the Felix Poetry Festival. The organizer, filmmaker and artist Alastair Cook, has just posted a call for submissions [PDF]. The deadline is May 1st, and the festival will be held on Saturday, June 14th in the FelixPakhuis in Antwerp.
In other Filmpoem-related news, Erica Goss’ “Third Form” column on videopoetry this month takes an in-depth look at Alastair’s work, including some of his best films and quotes from a telephone interview. Check it out.
And finally, as it says on the Filmpoem website, “Filmpoem has been invited to close the upcoming Hidden Door festival on 5th April 2014″ in Edinburgh. Alastair made the following show reel for the event, using a text from the Scottish poet Morgan Downie:
http://vimeo.com/84677290
Do join the Filmpoem group if you’re on Facebook.
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.
Todd Boss’ “Arrivals and Departures,” The Poetry Storehouse, and “12 Moons” featured at Connotation Press
Erica Goss‘ monthly column on videopoetry at Connotation Press, The Third Form, focuses this month on “three video poetry projects … that demonstrate how talent, collaboration and the DIY spirit continue to expand this art form.”
Viewers will see poetry films projected on the gigantic backdrop of St. Paul’s Union Depot train station. Todd Boss, poet, co-founder of Motionpoems and public artist, has embarked on an ambitious project called Arrivals and Departures. The historic Union Depot, saved from demolition and now the focus of a $243 million project, will get the video poetry treatment from Todd and his crew beginning in early October.
[…]
The Poetry Storehouse is Nic S.’s latest venture. Well-known for her vocal interpretations of poetry and for her innovations in the world of video poetry and poetry publishing via the nanopress, Nic said that “the idea came about through a couple of conversations I had about poetry, collaboration and influences.” One of those conversations, with poet and rabbi Rachel Barenblat, got Nic thinking about a place where people could contribute their poetry with the specific agreement that it be used in another artwork. The result was The Poetry Storehouse. Launched in October 2013, it’s already well-stocked and ready for remixing possibilities.
[…]
Finally, I have had the honor to be part of a team that includes Kathy McTavish, Nic S., and Swoon (Marc Neys). 12 Moons is based on twelve poems I wrote, one for every month of the year, with vocals from Nic, music from Kathy, and video plus concept and editing from Swoon. One by one, the team members added their parts: Nic made haunting, poignant recordings of each poem, to which Kathy added the soul-stirring music of her cello. Marc took those building blocks and added his special magic: combing through the archives of public access, vintage film to choose just the right scenes, plus adding his own film, he created twelve videos that explore one person’s life, month-by-month. I blogged about this in several posts at Savvy Verse and Wit.
