~ 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.
Poetry film festivals and screenings in October
October is definitely the biggest month on the calendar for fans of videopoetry/filmpoetry, cinepoetry and animated poetry, with at least six seven major events on both sides of the Atlantic. Here’s a brief rundown:
Canada
- Vancouver, Oct. 12: Visible Verse 2013 Festival
“The 2013 festival will be selected from more than 200 entries received from artists around the world. As well, we are happy to host Colorado poet and filmmaker R.W. Perkins, who will give an artist’s talk on video poetry and filmmaking.”
Ireland
- Cork, October 16-20: Ó Bhéal at IndieCork
“This is Ó Bhéal’s fourth year of screening poetry-films (or video-poems), and the first year featuring a competition.” Deadline: September 15
Italy
- Rome, October 24-25: 4th DOCtorCLIP Roma Poetry Film Festival
“An international jury will select a winner of the Doctorclip Award, including a cash prize, from among the ten selected videos of the contest.”
Lithuania
- Vilnius, Oct. 9-13: International Festival of Audiovisual and Experimental Poetry (TARP)
“Get ready for new forms of poetry, ajust your sensibility and get into wildness of poetry this year!” It will include a videopoetry workshop by Marc Neys (Swoon).
U.K.
- London, Oct. 3: National Poetry Day Live at the Southbank Centre
“Several new Poetry Society commissions will also premiere at National Poetry Day Live: a new film-poem by Alice Oswald and Chana Dubinski explores water’s most transient states; while poets including Liz Berry and Ian McMillan have travelled the nation’s canal network with film-maker Alastair Cook.” - Bristol, Oct. 3: Liberated Words at Bristol Poetry Festival
“We already have a fantastic line up of international screenings – including Maciej Piatek’s ‘Words’ from the poems of Polish immigrants, making us look twice at how we live our lives in Britain.”
U.S.
- Minneapolis, Oct. 19: Co-Kisser Annual Poetry-Film Festival at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design
“The mission for the fest is to see how poets and filmmakers are defining the genre of poetry-films and to challenge and be inspired by any and all of these definitions.”
2013 Filmpoem Festival reviewed in The Huffington Post
Due to Moving Poems’, um, extended vacation this summer, I’ve neglected to share until now Robert Peake‘s review of the first Filmpoem Festival in his poetry column for the Huffington Post: “The Film-Poem Arrives in Britain.” Here’s a snippet:
Over two intensive days of screenings and discussions, poets and filmmakers from all over the world converged and convened in the Dunbar Town House on August third and fourth to experience some of the most innovative works in this emerging genre. Described as “slim, but international” by founder Alastair Cook, the group of sixty enthusiasts in attendance was dense with heavy-hitters in both poetry and film.
Scottish poet John Glenday appeared to discuss the experience of having one of his poems developed into film-poems by five different accomplished filmmakers. Above all, though, it was the quality of films that stand on their own in representing the unique and exciting possibilities of this new medium–for poets, musicians, and visual artists throughout the UK.
Peake concludes with a selection of six of his favorite films from the festival, shared as embeds (rather than just links) for maximum viewership. Check it out.
2013 Visible Verse Festival programme announced
The 2013 VISIBLE VERSE FESTIVAL programme has been announced at the Cinematheque’s website:
Visible Verse, The Cinematheque’s annual festival of video poetry, is back! Vancouver poet, author, musician, and media artist Heather Haley curates and hosts our celebration of this hybrid creative form, which integrates verse with media-art visuals produced by a camera or a computer. The 2013 festival will be selected from more than 150 entries received from artists around the world. As well, we are happy to host Colorado poet and filmmaker R.W. Perkins, who will give an artist’s talk on video poetry and filmmaking.
Video poetry and poetry film festivals and sites continue to pop up all over the world; The Cinematheque’s Visible Verse Festival is proud to maintain its position as North America’s sustaining venue for artistically significant video poetry. As founder of both the original Vancouver Videopoem Festival and Visible Verse, Heather Haley has provided a platform for the genre since 1999, and has also vigorously contributed to the theoretical knowledge of the form. Ms. Haley was honoured for her work with a 2012 Pandora’s Literary Award.
Click through for the full listing of film notes and showtimes. In a post at her blog One Life, Haley goes into a bit more detail about the selection process and the special artist’s talk:
As with last year, we received a record number of entries, over 200. … We received stellar works from South Africa, Thailand, Germany, Belgium, Portugal, Canada, the U.S, Ireland and the UK. With only one night of screenings, I am unable to include a lot of video poems I like.
Fortunately the program does include Literary Movement, a discussion with R.W. Perkins on the process of creating videopoems and the integration of modern filmmaking techniques, Q&A to follow. We will be screening his videopems Morning Sex & Blueberry Pancakes and Small Talk & Little Else. R.W. Perkins is a poet and filmmaker from Fort Collins, Colorado. His work has been published in the Atticus Review, Moving Poems, The Denver Egotist, The Connotation Press, and The Huffington Post Denver. Perkins’s work has been featured at film festivals all over the world, including an 18-state U.S. tour with the New Belgium Brewery’s Clips of Faith Beer & Film Tour in 2012 and at the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in Berlin, Germany. Perkins is also the creator and director of The Body Electric Poetry Film Festival, Colorado’s first poetry film festival, which held its inaugural event in May of this year. For more information on Perkins and his work, visit www.rw-perkins.com. We’re thrilled to have him!
The festival is Sat, Oct. 12 at the Cinematheque in Vancouver. My son has promised to edit a trailer for me, I’ll post it asap. *See* you there!
Filmpoem Festival 2013: Submit!
This is the last call for Filmpoem Festival 2013 – get them in the post folks! We’ve had some incredible entries so far. Check this.
VISIBLE VERSE FESTIVAL 2013 Call for Entries and Official Guidelines
- VVF seeks videopoems with a 12 minutes 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 for your videopoem along with a brief bio, full name, and contact information to Artistic Director Heather Haley at hshaley@emspace.com. There is no official application form nor entry fee.
VISIBLE VERSE FESTIVAL Oct. 2013 DEADLINE: Aug. 1, 2013
Deadline nears to submit to Filmpoem Festival
Just a reminder that July 1 is a little over three weeks away. And given how quickly time tends to fly in the summer, anyone who intends to submit work for screening at the first Filmpoem Festival shouldn’t delay! Here are the guidelines [PDF]. Also, it’s not to late to make or change your vacation plans. The Filmpoem Festival will take place on August 2-4 at Dunbar Town House, Dunbar, Scotland.
(Three other poetry film festival deadlines are coming up at the end of July/beginning of August, and one on September 15, so chronic procrastinators can take heart. See the list of deadlines I posted here the other week.)
Review of The Body Electric Poetry Film Festival in The Third Form
For her June “Third Form” column at Connotation Press, Erica Goss reports on the first Body Electric Poetry Film Festival. I’m continually frustrated by the paucity of reviews of poetry film festivals, so I was especially glad to get Erica’s impressions of this one (and of the city of Fort Collins, Colorado, which I’ve never visited). One thing I didn’t realize was that the festival organizer, R.W. Perkins, played a crucial role in keeping open the venue in which it was held:
A town that values culture should have an independent theater, but the Lyric Cinema was in danger of closing is doors last year. They needed a digital projector, which costs approximately $150,000, a steep price for a small business. Enter Kickstarter, with a high-energy video by R.W. Perkins. The Lyric raised the money for its projector, remaining a favorite place for movies and off-beat events (like The Body Electric).
I was also cheered to hear how well attended the festival was. Perkins obviously really knows how design and promote a popular event, even if it includes the dreaded word “poetry” in its description.
The thirty-four video poems that appeared in The Body Electric ranged from sensitive, emotional stories such as “Writer’s Block,” “The Barking Horse,” and “Husniyah” to edgy, animated videos (“Anna Blume”) to the tragically comic (“Portugal.”) Some featured exquisite, hand-made drawings (“Afterlight,” “Becoming Judas.”) I cannot emphasize enough how much these beautifully crafted videos benefit from seeing them on the big screen; for example, details of Cheryl Gross’s drawings for “Becoming Judas,” done in archival ball-point pen, are simply not visible on a tiny computer screen, and the complex layering of text, still images, photographs and rapid film clips of “The Mantis Shrimp” gain strength and power when viewed in the theater.
Read the rest of Erica’s review, which also includes examples of six of her favorite films from the festival.
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.
Call for submissions: Liberated Words Poetry Film Festival 2013
A new videopoetry festival is planned for Bristol, UK in October. The deadline for submissions is June 30th.
Festival organisers Sarah Tremlett and Lucy English in conjunction with Colin Brown of Poetry Can welcome videopoems of 3 minutes or less to be screened at Liberated Words poetry film festival, as part of Bristol Poetry Festival, October 2013.
There are two separate categories for this year’s inaugural festival:
Four by Four
Videopoems of three minutes or less are invited as a response to a printed poem by four poets.
The poets and poems are:
Philip Gross: Heaps
Lucy English: from ‘Take Me to the City’
Jo Bell: The Shipwright’s Love Song
Johnny Fluffypunk: Bill Blake’s Birthday Cake for Adrian MitchellWinning entries of each poem will be screened as the highlight of the festival at the Arnolfini, Bristol.
Liberated Words II
We are also inviting videopoetry makers to submit 3 minutes of their most recent work broadly supporting the theme of ‘liberated words’.
The selected poetry films will be shown at a Liberated Words II screening at the Arnolfini Bristol.
See the announcement post for background and other information.
Three Motionpoems screenings upcoming in Minnesota
Via their email newsletter, I just learned about two upcoming events from Motionpoems in Minneapolis/St. Paul: a double screening of a dozen new poetry films on April 24th, and a screening of poetry films by Minnesota authors on April 29th. The full details are currently posted at www.motionpoems.com, though for archival purposes, let me also link directly to the image file.
I’m sure Angella and Todd will eventually post their 2013 films to Vimeo, probably one a month as they have in the past, but if you’re anxious to see them all now and on the big screen, then clearly you need to get to the world premiere screenings on April 24th!
