~ 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.
Feature films announced for the NYC episode of the International Literary Film Festival
Day 1 of the International Literary Film Festival
On Monday Nov 14, 60 Writers / 60 Places will be screened on the first evening of the International Literary Film Festival, a festival I founded a few months ago. According to our festival’s website:
60 Writers / 60 Places, a film by Luca Dipierro and Michael Kimball, is about writers and their writing occupying untraditional spaces, everyday life, everywhere. It begins with the idea of the tableaux vivant, a living picture where the camera never moves, but the writers read a short excerpt of their work instead of silently holding their poses. There is Blake Butler reading in a subway, Deb Olin Unferth in a Laundromat, Jamie Gaughran-Perez in a beauty salon, Tita Chico in a dressing room, Gary Lutz at the botantical gardens, Will Eno in a park, Tao Lin next to a hot dog cart, and Rick Moody on a baseball field. The writer and the writing go on no matter what is going on around them.
Watch a trailer for 60 Writers / 60 Places on YouTube
Watch another trailer for 60 Writers / 60 Places on YouTube
Day 2 of the International Literary Film Festival
On Tuesday Nov 15, Doc will be screened on the festival’s second evening. According to our festival’s website:
Doc, a film by Immy Humes, presents a portrait of her father, the legendary forgotten novelist and counterculture icon Harold Louis “Doc” Humes. Doc’s friends and family—including Norman Mailer, George Plimpton, Timothy Leary, William Stryon, Peter Matthiessen, Paul Auster, and Jonas Mekas—weave together a story of politics, literature, protest and mental illness, shedding light on an original mind as well as the cultural history of postwar America.
Watch a trailer for “Doc” on YouTube
Watch another trailer for “Doc” on YouTube
Short Literary Films
Several short literary films will also be screened on the two evenings of the festival. The program for short lit films will be announced soon on www.LiteraryFilmFestival.com.
Program announced for Visible Verse videopoetry festival
Heather Haley has posted the program for the Visible Verse videopoetry festival, which will be in Vancouver, BC on Friday, Nov. 4 and Saturday, Nov. 5 at the Pacific Cinematheque. A few of the filmmakers’ names were familiar to me from curating Moving Poems (Swoon Bildos, Alastair Cook, Kathy McTavish), but the majority were not, which is exciting: it suggests that my online anthology, extensive as it is becoming, is really only the tip of the iceberg. Not only do I miss a lot of good stuff, but many people never upload their films to a video-sharing site, especially those who are more focused on getting into festivals.
This year’s festival will also include an artist talk/Q&A with Tom Konyves, focusing on his recent Videopoetry: A Manifesto, and a live reading by a vsisiting videopoet, Rich Ferguson.
Incidentally, the Facebook group page for the Visible Verse Festival, source of this information, is a good place to find links to new work, since anyone can join and post to it.
Two new festivals are looking for poetry films
Two new peripatetic film festivals are currently accepting submissions of videopoetry and other poetry-related films. South African videopoet Kai Lossgott is organizing Letters from the Sky: experimental films on climate change, which seeks “experimental film, artist’s film, video art, microcinema, animation, screen dance, video poetry” which address the question:
How does climate change affect your habitat? Participating artists should respond to the brief and the theme of evidence of climate change. In researching a personal but informed response to the topic, dialogue/collaboration with scientists is encouraged. Using film as a medium, the complex issues at hand should be transformed into dynamic but simple audiovisual experiences with both popular and critical merit. The work may not be longer than 4 minutes. Brevity is strongly encouraged.
The original screening will be part of the COP 17 global climate summit in Durban, South Africa, 28 November – 9 December 2011, “as well as Johannesburg and Cape Town. Thereafter, selections of the programme will travel to international film festivals.” The deadline is coming up soon — September 20. See the Open Call for Films and Proposals for more information.
The International Literary Film Festival is scheduled to kick off in Brooklyn, New York in November, and thereafter to travel to Berlin, Leiden, and Cha-am, Thailand over the following 14 months. The organizer, Lee Bob Black, is looking for films in four categories: feature literary film (longer than 60 minutes), short literary film (shorter than 60 minutes), documentary film about literature (longer than 60 minutes), and documentary short film about literature (shorter than 60 minutes). The deadline is October 14. See the website for a submission form and additional details.
Visible Verse Festival 2011 call for submissions
Submissions to the Visible Verse Festival in Vancouver are due by September 1. Don’t miss your chance to be part of North America’s premiere videopoetry festival.
2011 VISIBLE VERSE FESTIVAL
Call for Entries and Official Guidelines:
- VVF seeks videopoems, with a 15 minutes maximum duration.
- Either official language of Canada is acceptable, though if the video is in French, an English-dubbed or-subtitled version is required. Videos may originate in any part of the world.
- 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.
- Videopoem producers should provide a brief bio, full name, and contact information in a cover letter. There is no official application form nor entry fee.
DEADLINE: Sept. 1, 2011
- Send, at your own risk, videopoems and poetry films/preview copies (which cannot be returned) in DVD NTSC format to: VISIBLE VERSE c/o Pacific Cinémathèque, 200-1131 Howe Street, Vancouver, BC, V6Z 2L7, Canada. Selected artists will be notified and receive a standard screening fee. For more information contact Heather Haley at: hshaley@emspace.com
Poetry in Film Festival 2011 now accepting submissions
Like our own videopoem contest, PIFF 2011 challenges filmmakers to make a short film in response to the same poem — in their case, “Four Letters, Three Words” by Brenda Hilton. But their contest is a much more high-powered affair with entry fees and screenings and whatnot, and they also don’t require that the poem be incorporated into the film, only that the film should be a response to it. Here are the rules and regulations.
New directories: poetry film festivals, and free-to-use audio and video
I’ve just posted two new pages of resources for videopoem and poetry-film makers.
The Poetry film festival list includes websites and, where available, Facebook pages for regularly occurring poetry film festivals. Left off the list, at least for now, are all the more general film festivals to which poetry films might be submitted.
Web resources for videopoem makers includes information on determining what’s free to use, as well as links to free and Creative Commons-licensed film and video, spoken word, sound and music collections. I also include a link to the software I use for downloading videos from the web, but I welcome other suggestions.
Please use the comments here or at the respective pages to alert me about other links I should include. I would also encourage people who regularly use Creative Commons-licensed material to follow the Golden Rule and apply a “copyleft” license to your own work, as well. (I don’t always remember to do this myself, but I should.)
Advance screening of Korean film Poetry in NYC Feb. 9
The following press release from Poets House just came over the transom, and I thought it might be of interest to those in the New York City area. —Dave
Poets House is delighted to present an advance screening of the new, award-winning Korean film Poetry with an introduction and discussion by film critic Michael Atkinson. A reception to follow.
Wednesday, February 9, 2011, 6pm
Poets House, 10 River Terrace, at Murray Street
This event is FREE FOR POETS HOUSE MEMBERS. To renew your Poets House membership, click here. $10 for the general public.
RSVP by Friday, February 4, 2011 to rsvp@poetshouse.org or by phone 212-431-7920, ext. 2832. (Email strongly preferred.)
Advance praise for the film Poetry
“An extraordinary vision of human empathy.” – Manohla Dargis, The New York Times
“A life-size movie about loss and self-discovery.” – Wesley Morris, The Boston Globe
Acclaimed Korean director Lee Chang-dong (“a major figure in world cinema” – The New York Times) follows his award-winning Secret Sunshine with the story of another woman raising a child on her own.
Mija (an extraordinary performance by veteran actress Yun Jung-hee) is a proper, sixty-ish woman struggling to provide for her adolescent grandson. Faced with the discovery of a heinous family crime, she finds strength and purpose upon enrolling in a poetry class — a creative process that allows her to understand and escape her own pain.
Best Screenplay winner at the Cannes International Film Festival and an official selection at the New York, Toronto and Telluride Film Festivals, Poetry is a masterful study of the subtle empowerment of an indefatigable woman.
Poetry opens in New York City on February 11. Click here for the film’s official page.
MICHAEL ATKINSON is a former film critic for The Village Voice and has written for The Believer, Spin, Details, LA Weekly, The Boston Phoenix, The Stranger, Interview, and more. He is also the author of five books, and he lectures on film history and screenwriting at C.W. Post/Long Island University and New York University.
2011 Visible Verse Festival Call for Entries and Official Guidelines
- Visible Verse seeks videopoems, with a 15 minutes maximum duration.
- Either official language of Canada is acceptable, though if the video is in French, an English-dubbed or-subtitled version is required for consideration. Videos may originate in any part of the world.
- 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.
- Videopoem producers should provide a brief bio, full name, and contact information in a cover letter. There is no official application form nor entry fee.
Send, at your own risk, videopoems and poetry films/preview copies (which cannot be returned) in DVD NTSC format to: VISIBLE VERSE c/o Pacific Cinémathèque, 200-1131 Howe Street, Vancouver, BC, V6Z 2L7, Canada. Selected artists will be notified and receive a standard screening fee.
For more information contact host and curator Heather Haley at hshaley[at]emspace[dot]com or visit the website.
Heather Haley reports on Visible Verse festival
The organizer and instigator of Visible Verse blogs about this year’s special restropective of the first ten years of what has become the premiere videopoetry event in North America. A sample:
Friday night’s Vancouver Videopoem Festival 1999-2002 retrospective screening was the biggest challenge as we had to mediate the clunkiest and oldest formats: ¾ inch tape and beta. I rolled up my sleeves and got down to business around 9 AM. At 6, PC Art Director Steve Chow expressed shock that I was still there. “Real time, my man!” I said. “No way around it. And remind me never to do this ever again.” It was nerve wracking!
New Poetry in Film Festival debuts in Melbourne
Last Sunday I happened on the website of the Poetry in Film Festival — as it happened, the very day the festival was to be held. It sounds really neat. The unique thing about it was that all contestants were given the very same poem to interpret: “The Briefcase Phenomenon,” by Libby Hart. Films had to be between 4 minutes and 7 minutes in length, and could be in “any genre including drama, comedy, horror, sci-fi, documentary, music video, animation or experimental. Words from the poem can be used within the film but this is not a requirement.” (See the complete rules.) Judging by the brief descriptions, the finalists seem quite different from one another.
With sponsorship from the Australian Poetry Centre, ABC Radio National, and a major Australian movie theater chain, this hardly sounds like a fringe event. However, a Google news search turns up no coverage of it whatsoever. I hope it was a success.
New “motionpoems” to be unveiled October 8 in Minneapolis
“Motionpoems” is the term preferred by filmmaker Angella Kassube and poet Todd Boss at motionpoems.com for what the rest of us variously call videopoems, film poems, cinepoetry, etc. Kassube and Boss are responsible for a number of quite lovely films illustrating not only Boss’s own poems, but a growing number of others’ as well. They’re helping to raise the bar for mainstream poetry animation in the U.S.
Click through to their website for a description of the upcoming screening event (which I can’t copy-and-paste from or directly link to because it’s a Flash-based site). The list of films to be screened looks tantalizing — poems by Jane Hirshfield, Terese Svoboda, Alicia Ostriker, Thomas Lux, and Robert Bly are among those featured. I hope we can expect to see them at motionpoems.com and on YouTube after their Minneapolis debut.
(Update) Angella Kassube provided some additional detail about the event in an email. She wrote:
The really groovy thing about our screening is it is actually a great discussion about poetry and interpreting poetry. Everyone talks about how their piece came together, the audience is engaged and they ask great questions and have great comments. It’s an incredible evening—we expect about 150 people to be there.
“It is a lot of work,” she added about the motionpoems project in general, “but Todd and I just keep going.” I hope anyone in the upper Midwest who can make this screening will turn out and support them.
Congratulations to Alastair Cook for having two of his videopoems selected for the 5th ZEBRA Poetry film Festival in Berlin, which will be held October 14-17. Both films have been featured at Moving Poems: “Emily Melting” (a poem by Gerard Rudolf) and “Scene” (a poem by Morgan Downie).
