Opening on 20th May is the International Poetry Film Festival of Thuringia held in Weimar, Germany.
The in-person event runs until 22nd May, while online lasts until the end of the month. Tickets available through Eventbrite https://www.eventbrite.de/e/international-poetry-film-festival-of-thuringia-tickets-333442003007
For full details of the programme please see their website: https://poetryfilmtage.de/
Held in Spain since 2017, the Maldito Video Poetry Festival is open for submissions for 2022. The festival takes place in the city of Albacete (screening date yet to be determined).
The festival is organized by non-profit Association Cultural Maldito; formed by a small team of professionals from the film industry, poetry and culture in general. They explain their festival and their name:
“MALDITO seeks to vindicate video poetry as an art that connects people, transmits feelings and stimulates different ways to see the world. It is also a tiny contribution of enormous people to empower visual art, stopping it from being marginal and damned*.
* The Spanish word for damned is MALDITO.”
Poetry films must be 5 minutes or less, and films in languages other than Spanish must have Spanish subtitles. The deadline for entry is 25 September 2022, full details on submission is available on their website: https://malditofestival.com/registration-video-poetry-contest-medium-full-length-film/
Four possibilities for entry … two dedicated festivals, a festival that includes poetry film within a category, and something that doesn’t mention poetry film at all (but could have potential).
In Ireland there is the Ó Bhéal 10th Winter Warmer poetry festival. The festival will happen 25th-27th November 2022 in Cork and will include the 2022 Poetry Film Competition.
Submissions are open from now until 31st August and are free, and open to all for films of up to 10 minutes. Full guidelines on entry are available on their website: https://www.obheal.ie/blog/competition-poetry-film/
Meanwhile Arts + Literature Laboratory are running their third Midwest Video Poetry Fest on 7-8th October 2022 in Wisconsin, USA, and submissions to this event are open until 1st July for films of up to 7 minutes. More about the event and previous festivals are on their website: https://artlitlab.org/programs/literary-arts/midwest-video-poetry-fest
Full details and entry are on FilmFreeway.
MicroMania FilmFest exists for films of up to 5 minutes. This festival is not specifically aimed at poetry film but the freestyle category description includes poetry film as one of the areas of interest and has options for films under 2 minutes and 2-5 minutes. I could also imagine some films from our genre fitting into the experimental category too. The event will be in person and online from 3–24 September 2022. See FilmFreeway for more details and entry
And finally a more left-field possibility: Sensoria 2022. This is a festival of film, music and digital happening in Sheffield, UK from 30 September to 8th October 2022. The organisers say:
“The festival team are on the hunt for exciting new work in the realms of music, film and digital.
We’d also love to hear from potential partners, co-promoters or anyone who wants to make a suggestion – do get in touch.”
If you explore the Sensoria website you will glean that the festival is heavily aimed towards music. But if your poetry film includes music in an exciting way, particularly if it has original music – then I think you may have what the organisers are looking for: “short films with innovative soundtracks or scores”. Read more about the event on their website: https://www.sensoria.org.uk/news/sensoria-2022-call-for-submissions/
I love to see poetry film crossing over into other worlds and while some opportunities may be long shots, the more that poetry filmmakers enter into wide-ranging events, the more we can hope to bring what we do to wider audiences. Selection for events can be less about the definition of a genre and more about the little thing that captures the imagination and excitement of the selector – and who knows which film might just do that …
A big welcome to Jane Glennie who has joined us at Moving Poems. Jane is currently working on the magazine part of the site, especially sharing info on festivals, contests, and other opportunities for videopoets and poetry filmmakers. With her help, we hope to get back to covering the international poetry film scene at least as well as we did before the pandemic, if not better.
Jane Glennie’s poetry films have screened at festivals across the world. Her work has a layered visual aesthetic that is abstract, painterly and floods the imagination. Here’s her current artist’s statement. Her films have been featured on shondaland.com and have received distinctions and awards internationally.
Jane studied Typography & Graphic Communication at Reading University before completing an MA in Art & Space at Kingston School of Art. With over 25 years experience as a freelance designer, she founded Peculiarity Press to collaborate on books with art and words. We are thrilled to have her on board.
The ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival is inviting entries for the 2022 International Poetry Film Competition. Entries open on 1st May.
The event is long-running and very big in the world of poetry film. The organisers describe this year’s event:
“The 13th ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival runs from 3rd to 6th of November 2022 in the Kino in der KulturBrauerei and in the Haus für Poesie. It is the largest international platform for poetry film worldwide. Since 2002 it offers poets, film and festival makers from all over the world a platform for creative exchange, brainstorming and meeting with a broad audience. With a competition, film programmes, poetry readings, retrospectives, exhibitions, performances, workshops, colloquia, lectures and a children’s programme, it presents in various sections the diversity of the genre of poetry film.”
For full details about the call out, please see: https://www.haus-fuer-poesie.org/en/zebra-poetry-film-festival/zebra-poetry-film-festival-2022/call-entries/
Or look out for them on FilmFreeway
FESTIVAL POEM
As well as the international competition open to all poetry, the event also has a ‘festival poem’ – this year THE HAIRCUT by Georg Leß. Filmmakers are invited to make an interpretation of this film for the festival. The three best film adaptations’ directors will be invited to Berlin, where they will be able to present their films and speak with the poet.
Travel and accommodation in Berlin for the three selected directors will be paid for by the Festival.
Italian festival La Punta Della Lingua (or in English ‘Tip of the Tongue’) announces their 2022 poetry film competition as part of their ‘total poetry festival’ …
The organisers say:
“La Poesia che si vede is an international competition for poetry films based in Ancona, Italy. It is the product of the collaboration between two important festivals: La Punta della Lingua International Poetry Festival and Corto Dorico Film Festival. The first edition of La Poesia che si vede was held in July 2021. Its second edition will take place in June 2022.
The competition’s mission is the challenge of researching, promoting and supporting new gazes, poetics, visions. From the kinetic text to the sound text, from the visual text to the cin(e)poetry up to the filmed performance, the videopoetry for La Poesia che si vedo is total poetry, without discrimination of genre or format.”
The FilmFreeway page for the competition is: https://filmfreeway.com/LaPoesiaCheSiVede where you will also find further details and rules for entry. Deadline for submissions: 18th of May 2022.
More information about the wider festival is at: https://www.lapuntadellalingua.it/
Cadence Video Poetry Festival 2022 in person was this weekend in Seattle, USA (21–24 April) but there is still time to enjoy the online element of this hybrid festival.
There are five intriguing programs of films available:
As the wind is breathing • It is strange and kinda symbolic • Its flashes are flashes of fire – What is hidden needs to be seen • When I’m not asking for permission
… which showcase between 6 and 13 films each. Tickets are available for the whole online event, but also for individual programs.
More about the whole festival is on the main site: https://nwfilmforum.org/festivals/cadence-video-poetry-festival/
Or if you want to skip straight to the online screenings: https://watch.eventive.org/cadence2022
I’ve always loved language and languages. I did Latin, French and German at school and I could easily have ended up studying linguistics in a slightly different universe. For me, poetry and experimental writing are fundamental ways to explore the limits of language: to try to describe what cannot be put into words, to find out what happens when language is stripped down to its essentials (whatever they are…), to discover how the visual, oral and aural aspects of language interact.
Combining video with poetry and experimental writing has been a revelation in this context. In a video, text can be dynamic, as it changes and morphs in multiple dimensions. Voices can be added, distorted, re-timed, presented in counter-point to each other and to on-screen text; they can even be made to articulate the literally unspeakable via increasingly sophisticated text-to-speech algorithms. And then there are all the possible interactions between the text of the video and its audio-visual content.
Over the last few years, I’ve been increasingly interested in how we deal with translation in poetry videos. I have had many videos screened in non-English speaking festivals and installations where there is usually a requirement for subtitles in either English or the native language. But sometimes, there is an absolute requirement for subtitles in the native language. I also have collaborated with non-English speaking poets which has required me become familiar with at least some aspects their native tongue. And I have even created a genuine bi-lingual video poem.
So how do we deal with multi-lingualism? How should the translations work? There is a large literature on the nature of translation, as well as the underlying neuroscience of bi- and multi-lingualism. But I have been strongly influenced by a couple of books in particular, both of which have been written by authors who have translated some of the most influential experimental poetry and writing :
Poetry videos offer a unique slant on translation that is not available for written text: videos give us the option to hear the original language, and, indeed, read the original written text itself as well as a translation. And we still have access to all the same audio-visual material and its interactions with the text. One corollary of this is that the translated text does not necessarily have to be as “poetic” as the original. It may not even need to be a complete translation, if the sound of the original and its accompanying imagery allow.
It is very common for translated poetry videos to have subtitles added in a similar way to any other video or film. However, conventional subtitles can clash with the visual aesthetic of the video. Nearly all my poetry videos have at least some of the text embedded in them, as part of the overall visual design. When adding translated text, I try to use the same fonts, layouts and designs as the original, so that the look of the video is not changed and the translation is seen as a natural component of the work. Another option is to use closed captions for a translated version. It does not look very elegant, but it allows the user to turn the translation on or off. A further advantage is that the text exists as a separate underlying time-stamped file (eg .srt format) that can be translated by a third party as required.
So now to the big question: how do we actually get the translation? Ideally, you are sufficiently knowledgeable in the appropriate languages to do it yourself. I can do that well enough for German or French, and I have made a genuine bilingual English-French video based on a poem of mine, Signature, originally published in the French journal Recours Au Poème. But although I have become familiar with some aspects of other languages, most notably Spanish, Italian, Greek and Swedish, I cannot translate from English into them. Instead, I rely on machine translation, good dictionaries and, when necessary, advice from a native speaker.
My preferred machine translation system is DeepL which, when tested on languages I do know, performs better than Google Translate across the board, especially when the language becomes more idiomatic or figurative. The suggested translations can be checked and fine tuned in several ways. One is to simply back-translate the phrase to see if you get the same thing. Using a different system for the back-translation (such as Google Translate) can also be useful. Another good strategy is to replace some of the words in the original with synonyms or near-equivalents and compare how they get translated. If the translation offers options, I often look them up in the native language dictionary or thesaurus (eg Wiktionary) that shows how they understand the meaning of the word and how it should be used. And I always keep a grammar book at hand for the language in question to find out how it is structured and how things like tenses, cases, pronouns, adjectives, etc, actually function. These resources have been critical for most of my translations.
Sometimes, the translation simply will not work. An implied meaning in one language perhaps cannot be made in another, often because of the way the grammar rules operate. As is well known to translators, there are idioms and turns of phrase that do not cross languages or cultures. Experimental writing or visual poetry that relies on the intrinsic structure of words and their grammatical variations may be impossible to translate in any literal manner. What do we do then? We simply watch the video, listen to the ebbs and flows of words that even a native speaker may not understand, and revel in the uncertainty of it all.
Click here to see all Ian’s videos with translations.
This essay first appeared on Ian’s blog, which anyone with a serious interest in videopoetry ought to follow. —Dave B.
A festival of films exploring how people interacts with buildings and urban spaces in the public realm. We aim to screen short films/poetry film that investigates how we experience the build environment.
[LIVING WITH BUILDINGS is brought to you by the Disappear Here poetry film project]
We’re looking for work up to 5 mins in length, anything between the poetry-film, experimental, short-documentary strands of film-making. The project is rooted in the UK city of Coventry, famed for its ringroad, modernist architecture and reinvention as a city rising from the ashes and ruins of arial bombing in World War Two – we are happy to consider work from citizens all around the world.
The psychopathology of underpass and overground.
Floating towers holding up the sky.
Living With Buildings.
Finding our way(s) through the subterranean culture and dead roads with no ending.
Exploring internal tensions between regeneration and gentrification.Remaking and remodelling urban spaces as forces of commerce or gentle revolution take hold and fight for ownership.
Where does the citizen fit into these processes; and how do we interpret or express their experiences of the ground shifting beneath their feet.
Find out more about the Disappear Here project – http://www.disappear-here.org
VENUE
LTB SHOWROOMS (above the Litten Tree pub) – COVENTRY – CV1 1EX – 1 Warwick Road
Rules & Terms
Atticus Review has published videopoetry in their Mixed Media section for over 10 years. The journal is currently calling for submissions of work for publication…
Atticus Review seeks all types of mixed media works for publication: videopoetry, short/experimental films, electronic/digital/interactive literature, visual artwork, animation, comics, audio soundscapes, sonic compositions, etc. If you like to push literary boundaries with alternative approaches, send us your best. We do accept previously published/screened work.
We potentially accept work with any theme, but upcoming themed issues are: The Internet (August 15th, 2022), Language (December 15th, 2022).
To submit, send an email with the subject “Mixed Media Submission” to mixedmedia@atticusreview.org. For video, audio, and interactive literature we prefer that you send links on Vimeo or YouTube or Soundcloud (or wherever the work is posted online) rather than send us files directly.
Pleased to see this:
Date: Saturday 17th April 2021
Price: Free
Time: 12:00 – 1:00pmA screening of poetry films on the theme of Reconnection, curated by Liberated Words. Reconnection to landscape, the body, our history, family and heritage, during and before the pandemic. Artists featured include Kat Lyons, Edalia Day, Rebecca Tantony, Alice Humphreys, Liv Torc, Yvonne Reddick, Helmie Stil, Helen Johnson, Sarah Tremlett, Sarah Wimbush, Isobel Turner, Edson Burton, Michael Jenkins, Pierluigi Muscolino and Francesco Garbo. Followed by a discussion and Q&A with Sarah Tremlett and Lucy English of Liberated Words.
In registering for the event, I found that I had to use a UK postcode — your mileage may vary. Get your free ticket here.
It looks as if I might’ve neglected to post the original call-out for the 6th Weimar Poetry Film Award. It’s here, but I’ll paste it in below as well:
Through the Weimar Poetry Film Award the Literary Society of Thuringia and the Weimar Animation Club 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 10:00 mins, which explore the relation between film and written poetry in an innovative, straightforward way. Films that are produced before 2018 will not be considered.
The competition »Weimar Poetry Film Award« is financed by Kulturstiftung des Freistaats Thüringen and the City of Weimar. The competition is part of the »International Poetry Film Festival of Thuringia«.
From all submitted films selected for the festival competition three Jury members will choose the winner of the main awards (Best Animation, 1200 €; Best Video, 1200 €). Moreover, an audience award of 250 € will be awarded.
Dates & Deadlines
Form for submissions [pdf] by e-mail to info [at] poetryfilm.de