~ 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.
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.
4th Sadho Poetry Film Fest will be held Dec. 11-12 in New Delhi
Asia’s premiere poetry film festival is set for next Wednesday and Thursday, running from 6:30-8:30 each evening.
We showcase films, that broadly fall into following categories:
- Poetry films – based on or inspired by a poem. Most of the films in the festival are of this genre
- Poetic films – films that are highly poetic in their cinematic construction. We include some of the finest of this vast and varied genre in our festival.
- Poetry Discourse – films that engage in a debate about the image, the word and life.
- Film on poets
I was interested to learn that the name Sadho is derived from the poetry of Kabir:
Sadho is a voluntary organization that aims at taking great ‘poetry to people’ from all walks of life, through the innovative use of arts, media and social action.
Sadho is based on the conviction that poetry should not remain confined to books and literary circles. It should reach out to all sensitive people who have an interest in other arts and issues. Towards this end, Sadho tries to create new ways of sharing, promoting and enjoying poetry.
Initiated in 2007, Sadho has set-up Asia’s first poetry films festival, has introduced sign-language poetry films to India, organised workshops on poetry, painting and cinema and created art based on poetry, including poetry souvenirs and wallpapers. IT also tries to encourage poetry among children by publishing their poems on the website and offers special screenings of poetry-films for children.
Sadho soon plans adding a new vertical to its activities – poetry albums. These would include recordings featuring some of the prominent poets from various languages.
Sadho functions as a not-for profit charitable trust supported mostly by the donations of volunteers and well-wishers. Its trustees and core team members are unpaid volunteers, and include people from various fields like literature, cinema, music, art, media and education.
Sadho, which literally means ‘O sage’, is the familiar addressee in the poetry of the great Indian saint poet Kabir. For us ‘Sadho’ is a call to all those with poetic hearts!
(Hat-tip: @ZebraFestival on Twitter)
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.
Doing videopoetry live, karaoke-style
I have an essay up at Voice Alpha, a group blog about reading poetry alive for an audience, on the unique challenges and rewards of doing a live reading accompanied by “karaoke” versions of videopoems — videopoems from which the poem has been stripped. I began by discussing a terrific example of this kind of performance which I’d been lucky enough to see this summer at the Filmpoem Festival in Dunbar, Scotland — the inspiration for my own first venture into videopoem karaoke this past Wednesday. Here’s part of what I concluded:
There was simply no question that I’d have to practice my ass off for a couple of days in advance, reading the poems over and over while the videos played in a VLC playlist on my laptop. With regular poetry readings, practice might seem optional (at least to poets who don’t read this site), but with audiovisual accompaniment, you have to come in on cue or the whole thing flops. I had assumed the screen would be behind me and prepared accordingly, but with it situated to my right, I didn’t have to glance exclusively at my laptop for visual cues.
Complete memorization of the poems would not have been a bad thing, much as I resist internalizing my own words to that degree. I wouldn’t have had to fumble with a book and set list, and possibly could’ve engaged more with the audience. However, with the audience focused on the screen, what really mattered was my vocal delivery, not eye contact. And with the accompanying music being generally melodic and at points down-right funky, it took off the pressure to give an absolutely flawless reading. So in a way, this approach offers a bit of a crutch to those of us (95% of poets?) who are not highly skilled performers.
There’s nothing like a live reading to improve one’s delivery, though. I had been afraid that the necessity to sync up my reading with prerecorded music and images might make for kind of a mechanical delivery, but I don’t think that happened. In fact, for some of the poems in the set, I found myself reading in a more intense, impassioned style than I used when I’d recorded myself alone in a quiet bedroom for the online versions of the videopoems. And since I had to pay close attention to the music for many of my cues, I think this approach actually improved my over-all sense of timing and rhythm.
I’d love to hear impressions from other poets who have given audio-visually enhanced readings. I know of quite a few.
CYCLOP International Videopoetry Festival in Kiev
The 3rd annual CYCLOP International Videopoetry Festival is coming up on November 16 and 17 in Kiev, Ukraine. For a description in English, see this very informative slideshow. They have a number of partners and media sponsors; it looks like a pretty major event. The focus is on contemporary Russian, Belorussian and Ukrainian authors, and they hold a competition “to draw attention to Videopoetry as a phenomenon and a separate art form.” Last year they also showed selections from the Argentine videopoetry festival VideoBardo, the German ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival, and Brooklyn’s International Literary Film Festival.
Here’s the 1st Place and People’s Choice Award winner from 2012, “1 + 1 = 1,” directed by Kalinichenko Xenia using a text by Mary Teymurazyan:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qh1XU1bwKEk#t=122
Scroll down the CYCLOP webpage for many more videos.
The 2014 Body Electric Poetry Film Festival is open for submissions
The Body Electric has just announced through its Facebook page that the 2014 festival, on April 26 in Fort Collins, Colorado, is now open for submissions. The rules and submission process are exceptionally simple, and last year’s festival was evidently a resounding success, so there’s really no reason not to submit. The deadline is February 16.
Swoon on leading a videopoetry workshop in Vilnius
Belgian filmmaker and musician Swoon (Marc Neys) gave a two-day videopoetry workshop as part of the TARP festival of audiovisual and experimental poetry in Vilnius, Lithuania earlier this month. His blog post about the experience should be of interest to videopoets and poetry teachers alike.
The participants get to experience the importance of timing, the power of coincidence, and, hopefully, the fun of playing with words and images. After that two groups were formed (making sure each group had someone familiar with film and/or video and someone willing to write) to work on a project of their own. Both groups took the results of the writing experiment as a starting point; One group used footage shot by one of the participants and combined two ‘poems’ of the experiment. In doing so creating two streams of thoughts played out against two streams of images. The other group wrote a new poem (using the same basic idea) and added self filmed footage and filmed some new material the day before the second part of the workshop.
The second evening we recorded the poems. Each group explained and showed their work in progress. Giving me a change to suggest, answer questions and help out where needed.
