~ News and Views ~

New Poetry Video Magazine: Blank Verse Films

I’m a little late with this news, but back on April 1, the poetry video producers Blank Verse Films expanded from their YouTube channel into what they’re calling a video magazine about poetry. I’m a firm believer that everyone who can afford to should establish their own, independent website and not be completely at the mercy of corporate hosting platforms, so this is really welcome news. Quoting their About page:

Blank Verse Films is a video magazine that produces poetry-related films. Our mission is to broaden the reach of poetry & literature by putting it on screens. We are operated by a few like-minded readers in Southern and Northern California.

Poems are selected largely through our own lonely impulse of delight. Commissions and partnerships are not our focus, but if you would like to reach out, we are receptive and you can email us with any inquiries. We operate as a non-profit through our fiscal sponsor Film Independent. You can support us through their donation page.

Our ambition is to establish ‘poetry videos’ as a recognized genre of film like music videos. If you want to post your own poetry video here, we encourage you to send it to us. Sign up for our newsletter to get updates on our films.

News Round-Up: Pandemic Edition

“Why Poetry?” Video Podcast Special on Poetry Film with Lucy English

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPti3riEkh0

This is such an excellent look at the role of collaboration in poetry film-making. A very well-edited and satisfying program, focusing on Lucy English’s Book of Hours project, it ought to work well as an introduction to the genre for poets and filmmakers alike.

Ó Bhéal Poetry-Film Competition Open for Submissions

Guidelines here.

Weimar Poetry Film Award: Festival Postponed, Deadline Extended

Guidelines here.

FVPS Deadline Extended and The Symposium Postponed until Fall 2020

“The Film and Video Poetry Society will postpone our 3rd annual symposium; we are hopeful, and are committed to rescheduling for fall 2020. Submissions remain open and our deadline extended to August 3, 2020.” More here.

Newlyn PZ Poetry Film Competition Winners Announced

The 2020 Newlyn PZ Film Festival was cancelled, but we still know the winners of the poetry film competition thanks to a post at the increasingly indispensable Liberated Words website.

Cadence Video Poetry Festival, Other Film Festivals Move Online

Rather than cancel entirely, the Cadence Video Poetry Festival made the choice of screening films online in five screenings on 15-19 April. A number of other film festivals are opting to screen films online for a few days as well. It’s a shame that so many film festivals bar submissions of films that are freely available online. Otherwise it might be possible for Cadence and others to post all competition films to the web on a permanent basis, and people with dodgier internet connections (including myself) would have an easier time watching them. If the pandemic makes meat-space festivals impossible for the next couple of years, as seems possible, some festivals might end up doing a 180 and requiring all submissions to be available on the web. That would certainly shake things up!

Visible Poetry Project Films All Online

The Visible Poetry Project is one web-first, festival-like thing that wasn’t hurt by the pandemic. A film went up each day in April, and you can watch them all on their website.

New Book on Videopoetry by Valerie LeBlanc and Daniel H. Dugas

Books on or about videopoetry are a rarity, and this one is available for free as a PDF, with a print version due out later this year. Here’s Sarah Tremlett’s mini review. It’s cool to be able to read about the making of a film and then click a live link to watch it. I’ll be interested to see whether the print edition includes QR codes allowing readers with mobile phones to watch the films as they read.

Online “Festival of Hope” Features Videopoetry

This is a cool festival. And it looks as if the films may remain live for a while.

Corona! Shut Down? Open Call and Ongoing Release of Videos

New Media 2020 Corona Festival banner

It’s not just for poetry videos, but this is well worth checking out — and submitting to. As they say, “Corona isn’t the plague, and not all infected people are gonna be dying. Probably, the crisis is a wake-up call – to rethink and change!?”

“Poetry and Climate” film screening at Lyra Bristol Poetry Festival

Lucy English and Sarah Tremlett of Liberated Words have organized a poetry film event focusing on poetry and climate on Saturday, March 14 in Bristol, UK. Tickets are free.

Curated by Liberated Words, these short poetry films will reflect on the current climate emergency as well as celebrate the natural world. Plus short discussion on the rising genre of poetry film and how artists and poets are responding to our changing environment. With Lucy English and Sarah Tremlett.

Arnolfini (Theatre)
Saturday 14th March 2020
1:00 – 2:00pm

There’s more information on the Liberated Words website, and it sounds like a really exciting event, with films from around the world and a panel discussion including Mark Smalley from Extinction Rebellion as well as UK ecopoets Helen Moore, Meriel Lland and Caleb Parkin. If you can’t make it to Bristol, Lucy and Sarah note that “We are also looking for further screening venues, and other poetry films on the subject, particularly including diversity within the makers.” For those who can attend, the whole festival looks pretty unmissable, with an overall theme of “climate, nature, and romantic Bristol.”

Winners of Atticus Review Videopoetry Contest

Congratulations to the Atticus Review Videopoetry Contest winners!

Top prize goes to Susanne Wiegner for Contemplation is Watching (below), from a poem by Robert Lax. Read comments from the judge, Marc Neys, and discover the three other prize winners here.

Unseen Forces and the Protagonist’s Point of View

presentation at ZEBRA 2019

Whilst subjectivity often lies in the hands of the poet, the film-maker can double the affect. This can be through their narrative use of the lens in relation to the position of the protagonist, or narrator, particularly in response to unseen forces; placing the viewer or camera in interesting and even culpable positions. I have selected three pairs of films that utilize contrasting approaches to this technique. The first two generate comic pathos; the second two focus on man’s inhumanity to man; and the final pair on the difficult dramatic technique of intimating freedom from negative forces beyond the screen (this world which is not that world).

The Desktop Metaphor (2017), by British poet Caleb Parkin, with filmic interpretation by Dutch film-maker Helmie Stil, centres in content and form on the subtly humorous juxtaposition of the prosaic with the profound and mythical in relation to man’s position in a desktop universe. The light from a steadily repetitive photocopier plays central stage in this film, accenting the repetitions in the poem, where office products alongside Stil’s photocopied face are interwoven with concepts of the infinite – ‘The Great Stapler which attaches the night to us’.

On Loop (2013), one of the funniest films in recent years by British film-maker and animator Christine Hooper, also focuses on the impotence of man’s condition in order to create humour. However, in this case the viewer is given the point of view of the invisible protagonist, who is in bed and tossing and turning with insomnia. In a short space of time we get to know exactly who the protagonist is, without ever seeing her, since an imagination in overdrive lets slip the jumbled contents of her thoughts. These are married with a visually fractured room, and a hyper-alert voice-over (Susan Calman) that is so well chosen to dramatically accentuate, through the sharply rising and falling tones of the melodic accent, a disjointed, racing imagination. Placing the viewer in the physical and mental position of the protagonist is a clever device, the comic pathos doubled in affect.

Two contrasting filmic approaches to man’s inhumanity to man are found in Numbers (English and Piatek, 2016) and Hopscotch (Vilk and Aisha 2017). Numbers begins with the film-maker and the footage itself. Maciej Piatek asked Lucy English to write a poem to the footage centering broadly on someone trying to find their way in society. Lucy arrived at the refugee survivor’s narrative, which Maciej paired with a voice-over by a survivor herself.

The black-and-white footage is from a laboratory, and I quote Maciej: ‘showing each stage of death of a human white blood cell, revealing the dying cells apparently trying to alert their immune system allies that they are dying’. He says he ‘looped and delayed in time the same piece of found footage to make it look like a disease outbreak. At the end of the film one can see in the left top corner the cell is actually disappearing’.

This film rests on the visual absence of the survivors themselves. The screen and the cells as human experiment are a surface to reflect upon, in the way that a tombstone in a graveyard focuses our thoughts. We are entirely tuned to the voice and its wholly credible narrative. However, the voice slowly disappears and the liquid vibrating aspect of the cells delicately suggests the negative role of water and the ocean in the stories. Although the survivor’s voice lets us know she survived, the screen tells us a different story. The film intimates what is not shown.

The next film, Hopscotch (2017), also intimates an insidious negative force, highlighting targeted, everyday abuse, particularly against Black Asian Minority Ethnic (BAME) women in Scotland. It is based on a poem by Nadine Aisha, and is directed by leading film-maker Roxana Vilk, with executive production by AMINA – Muslim Women’s Resource Centre with support from Rape Crisis Edinburgh.

We are immediately drawn into the centre of the conflict. An invisible stalker hisses suggestive remarks to a girl who then retorts ‘he says to me’ placing us, the viewer, as her third-party confidante. At the same time the camera focuses on a girl strolling across the screen on a cold evening. Through this clever filmic device, we see from dual points of view – as both her friend and her assailant – creating dramatic tension.

We cut to daytime, on a bus, and she continues: ‘Sat on the bus with a stranger’s hot breath’ and we are there again, but from the point of view of the abuser sitting right behind her, just as Christine Hooper placed us in the mind and physical position of the insomniac. ‘I want you’ he hisses. We follow our prey through the streets, and the abuse continues ‘stuck up bitch’ ‘what’s wrong, can’t you take this’, ‘Slut, slag’.

Standing alone in a railway station as everyone else speeds past, we recognize the victim’s frozen isolation, and how such abuse robs us of an authentic, relaxed interaction in public places. She is left with the fallout of the words and an ensuing alienation: ‘clenched them tight in fists that now mark the imprint of nameless men trying to name me’. The film continues for nearly five minutes, exposing us, the viewer, to a sense of an unending and unpredictable persecution. Ultimately the stalking camera reaches a climax where the victim turns, takes the camera, and starts filming herself. For a moment she, as in everywoman, triumphs; but through the majority of the narrative Vilk has expertly drawn us in, to inhabit the obsessive mind of the perpetrator.

Roxana told me (email 11 December 2019):

One of the reasons I was drawn to the style I used was also about reflecting on the “male gaze” in cinema in the sense that it is often male directors behind the lens; and I wanted to parallel that to this harassment of women in public spaces. Then to give the poet/ protagonist the chance at the end to grab the camera and turn the lens on herself… so she could speak to the audience without the male gaze and take back ownership of the story.

Freedom from unseen forces beyond the screen provides the central tenet in the final two films. In Quarry (2019) with poem by American poet Melissa Stein and animated line drawing by British artist animator Josh Saunders, a dramatic narrative is placed squarely in front of us. With a delicate and charming line illustration, a girl and boy swim naked in a quarry. However, through the concise and well-placed choice of words which indicate brooding danger – for example ‘a girl is swimming naked in dark water’ – an undercurrent of impending loss of innocence emerges.

The narrative is told as if in the third person, but as it reaches the denouement the narrator enters the first person. It is at this point that we sense that the earlier controlled use of language might indicate a personal psychological burial, now being exhumed. Within the developing drama, Saunders’ figures swim with innocence and a fragile, vibratory naivety; dipping into and below the surface – at one with the water, the rocks and each other. As we realize this event actually happened to the author, so we adjust, and mentally include the invasive eye of an intruder. Achieving delicacy and innocence in a film is a difficult feat; however, with such restraint, both visual and verbal, the result is powerful and memorable, and shows how animation can add to narrative in dramatic ways beyond live footage.

Storm Song (2019) by young British artist (and Central St Martins graduate) Rebecca Hilton is also set in water, but underwater, accompanied by two poems. On the surface, it appears to be a lyric, moving abstract painting where mermaid-like figures (some fully clothed and with long trailing fabric) unwind and intertwine, being both the ink and the brush. However, this film contains an underlying tension, and, rather than making a loud political statement, uses space, language and embodied gesture to subtly deny the constricts on the surface of enforced identities and ideologies from the powers that be – ‘for all we understand is power’.

Alongside an enigmatic voice-over, the viewer’s gaze finds itself broken by frequent black ‘rests’ – a technique I haven’t seen except with intertitles. These black spaces, in a ‘ma’-like way, inspire reflection on what has just been said. And just over halfway through the two poems interweave with each other. The themes in ‘Ghost Ribbon’ (2019) explore return from failure, whilst ‘Cataclysmic Storm’ (2019) investigates the weight of authoritarian power and control ‘Suspended up up up until you breathe’.

Whilst in Quarry we are taken on a developing narrative that intimates in its dramatic unselfconscious innocence a dark denouement, in Storm Song, the darkness gradually filters through, as a continuous invisible, quiescent force.


An earlier version of this essay appeared on Liberated Words.

Call for entries: ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival 2020

Adapted from a press release from the Haus für Poesie
ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival stage and audience

As of today, the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in Berlin is inviting entries for its competition for the best international poetry films. Eligible for entry are international short films produced since January 1, 2018 which are based on poems and are no more than 20 minutes in duration. All languages are allowed. The competition winners will be awarded prize money. A programme committee will select films for the international competition and for all the other festival programmes from among the entries. At the festival, the winning films will be selected by a jury comprising representatives from the worlds of poetry, film and media.

In addition, ZEBRA is inviting filmmakers to submit a film interpretation of this year’s festival poem “Lethe” by the poet TJ Dema.* Text and audio of the poem together with translations come from lyrikline.org, a leading online archive for poetry. The directors of the three best film interpretations will be chosen by the programme committee and invited to come to Berlin where they will have the opportunity to present their films at the festival and discuss them with the poet.

Entry deadline is the 1st of July 2020.

Conditions of participation and entry form are here. Please submit using FilmFreeway here.

The 11th ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival will run from November 19-22, 2020 in Berlin’s Kino in der KulturBrauerei. It’s the largest international platform for poetry film worldwide. Since 2002 it has offered 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 program, it showcases in various sections the diversity of the poetry film genre. In 2018, more than 1200 submissions from 97 countries were submitted for the international competition.

Follow ZEBRA at Haus für Poesie and on Vimeo, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
__________

*The Festival Poem may be used only for the purpose of film interpretation within the scope of this call for entries. For any other use at other festivals or on other platforms, etc. the film makers must obtain the rights from the rights holders.

Call for work: Cadence Video Poetry Festival 2020

Cadence 2020 poster

Cadence: Video Poetry Festival is open for submissions! This annual festival at the Northwest Film Forum in Seattle, Washington will host screenings on April 16 and 17 and is looking for work ranging from adaptations to collaboration to include in the festival. Cadence approaches video poetry as a literary genre presented as visual media that makes new meaning from the combination of text and moving image. Send Cadence your video poetry through March 1 via FilmFreeway.

The foregoing is the (slightly altered) text of a social-media-adapted press release that Chelsea Werner-Jatzke emailed me this week—a good indication, I suspect, of just how well organized this festival is generally. In case you missed it, I interviewed Chelsea and her co-conspirator Rana San last July. See “How to start a major new videopoetry festival: an interview with the co-directors of Cadence.”

Ground-breaking documentary about videopoetry now at Vimeo On Demand

At long last, the documentary Versogramas or Verses&Frames by Galician director Belén Montero—a unique, multicultural look at contemporary videopoetry through the eyes of 14 filmmakers—is available to watch on the web:

We have great news to share with you: Verses&Frames is now available at Vimeo On Demand. Watch it here!

Now you can enjoy the documentary at home, at any time, for a really low price. Moreover, we have released all the different linguistic versions of Verses&Frames, so you can choose five screening possibilities: original version in Galician with Galician subtitles, Spanish version with Spanish subtitles, English version with English subtitles, reduced Spanish and reduced English versions.

This is how it works: For 3€ you can “rent” the screening of the version you choose. It will be available for 24 hours so you can watch the documentary as many times as you want. You can reproduce it on iOS, Android, Apple TV, Roku and Chromecast.

One of our main objectives when producing Verses&Frames has always been to contribute to the knowledge, research, enjoyment and diffusion of videopoetry. As well as the screenings conducted at festivals, museums and television, we believe that this is a good way to deliver the content of the documentary directly to the public, and to share with you all the emotions that videopoetry arises.

So, just a click away: Verses&Frames On Demand.

That rental price in US dollars is just $3.32. The Vimeo description doesn’t include links to the videopoets interviewed in the film, but you can find that on the project’s website (also available in three languages). I wrote a somewhat critical but generally positive review of Versogramas for Poetryfilm Magazine in 2018. I wrote, in part, that

The interviews are creatively shot and well edited, and the interviewees all come across as fascinating people with uniquely unconventional approaches to making poetry and art. There wasn’t one of them whom I didn’t want to immediately track down on the web and watch every one of their videos, and I was pleased by how many of them were new to me, either because their work had never been translated into English, or because they just hadn’t happened to have crossed my radar.

This is testimony to the sheer breadth of the international videopoetry community, I think. It’s impressive that the producers can focus on just one part of the world—Spain, especially the Galician region—add a handful of filmmakers and videopoets from outside that region, and still end up with a highly varied, complete-feeling snapshot of the state of videopoetry in the 21st century.

So go check it out! I know I for one will definitely be watching it again.

Call for Entries: Atticus Review’s 2nd Annual Videopoem Contest

banner for the Second Annual Atticus Review Videopoem Contest

This week Atticus Review, one of the best online magazines to regularly feature videopoems, poetry films, and other multimedia literary works, announced that their second annual videopoem contest is open for submissions. Marc Neys AKA Swoon is the judge.

Atticus Review is happy to announce our second annual Videopoem Contest judged by Swoon. You can submit up to 3 videopoems. The cost for entry is $10. You may submit video files or links to Vimeo or YouTube pages. Please no submissions from former students or close acquaintances of the Contest Judge. The videopoems can be previously published.

 

First Prize: $250 & Publication
Second Prize: $50 & Publication
Third Prize: Publication
Deadline: January 12th, 20120
Winner Announced: January 31st, 2020
SUBMIT HERE

 

ABOUT THE JUDGE:
Marc Neys / Swoon / No One

 

No One is a composer, Swoon a video-artist, and both personas reside in Marc Neys from Belgium.

 

As one of the leading and most prolific figures in modern videopoetry he made videopoems for and with writers from all over the globe. He inspired new creators through his workshops and showcases on videopoetry.

 

He creates works with a focus on the purely poetic quality of the moving image in relation to the spoken or written poem. A sophisticated interplay of constructed soundscapes and images with personal reflections. Through a visual language and references to his everyday life, he creates a framework in which the poems come to a different development.

 

He released 3 CDs over the last two years and his videos have been selected and featured at festivals all over the world.

 

Links:
https://musicfromnoone.bandcamp.com/
https://vimeo.com/swoon

Marc follows Moving Poems’ own Marie Craven, who judged the contest last year. (Here are the results.) Marc wrote about his philosophy on judging poetry film contests after his experience on the ZEBRA jury in 2016.

Film festival news: Art Visuals & Poetry program; calls for work from Carmethan Bay, At the Fringe

2020 International Screening of Experimental Films and Videopoems AT THE FRINGE

In last week’s round-up I gave the Art Visuals & Poetry Film Festival too brief a mention since I hadn’t found much in English. But I just got a bilingual press release from organizer Sigrun Höllrigl, so I can rectify that. Here’s the English portion of her email. Note that the link at the end also goes to an English-language schedule of events.

FOCUS USA / International film guests
The Art Visuals & Poetry Film Festival will take place for the fifth time from November 29 to December 1, 2019 at the METRO Kinokulturhaus in Vienna. In addition to four competition programmes, Poetry Live and film talks with international guests, numerous curated film programmes will be shown. This year’s focus is on poetry films from the USA. Founded in 2013 by Sigrun Höllrigl, the Poetry Film Festival has grown steadily since its beginnings and, with 101 film screenings on three days it is currently the second largest poetry film festival world-wide. In addition to Todd Boss (Motionpoems USA), film guests from Dubai, Belgium, Germany and Ireland have announced their arrival and are expected to attend. Including the domestic film scene, 40 contributing artists will join the festival.
 
FILM COMPETITIONS AND AUDIENCE AWARD
In 2019, two international competitions were announced and 170 films submitted, 63 art works came from Austria. The festival will award cash prizes to 4 films: The Main Jury Prize and Special Award (poem by Sophie Reyer) will be awarded on the recommendation of the jury. The Hubert Sielecki Prize goes to an Austrian poetry film of his choice. This year, for the first time, the Audience Prize will be awarded among international films.  Have a look at the festival and vote for the winner on Saturday night! Festival tickets can be ordered via the ticket service of the Metro Kinokulturhaus. Phone +43 1 512 18 03 daily from 14:00–21:00 or via reservierung@filmarchiv.at
 
Find the festival programme online https://www.poetryfilm-vienna.com/en/timetable/2019
 
We are looking forward to welcoming you at the festival!

* * *

My co-editor Marie Craven is currently on the road (for the poetry film cause) but alerted me to two new-to-me festivals that are still open for submissions:

Carmarthen Bay Film Festival

This Welsh festival includes a POETIC CINEMA section for the first time this year:

Poetry film is a subgenre of film that fuses the use of spoken word poetry, visual images, and sound to create a stronger presentation and interpretation of the meaning being conveyed. This fusion of image and spoken word (both independent and interdependent) creates what William Wees called the “Poetry-film” genre.
 
We are looking for Submissions that:
• Are based upon an interesting concept;
• Are innovative;
• Are well crafted; and
• Create an emotional resonance

The sidebar category dropdown elaborates:

Poets, filmmakers, and media artists are called to submit their work to this brand new category. We will accept submissions of poetry films, filmpoems, digital-poetry, poetry video, Cin(E)-Poetry, spoken word films, videopoema, visual poetry, poetrinca, media poetry, and all films that are visually driven by text. Eligible submissions must have a maximum length of 40 minutes. CBFF cannot be held liable or responsible for any claim involving copyright, trademark, credits, or royalty infringement.Entries that are not in English must be subtitled in English.

Unfortunately, it’s rather pricey to enter—currently USD $45—so I kind of doubt that they’ll get many submissions from the more avant-garde sub-genres they include in their list. This strikes me as a bunch of film industry types wanting to add a bit of experimental cachet to their program, while not actually welcoming scruffier poets and auteurs. Interesting as a possible sign of the times, though.

AT THE FRINGE International Arts Festival

AT THE FRINGE International Arts Festival will take place in Tranås (Sweden) from 27th June to 4th July 2020.
The film section of the festival is focused on screening experimental films and videopoems from all over the world and we are happy to open the new call for films!
 
Submit your film in one of these three sections: […]
 ​
GEMS – OPEN CALL FOR VIDEOPOEMS
A collection of precious stones. We are looking for videopoems, those films that stand on the border between audiovisual languages and words – written or performed. The festival is open to national and international filmmakers. Any film with no limitation of theme or duration is welcome to apply.
[…]
The videopoems submitted must have a duration of maximum 30 minutes (opening and ending credits included). They must include subtitles in English or Swedish (where the original language is not one of these two). There is no limitation for the number of works that each author can submit.

It’s great to see something like this in Sweden. And this time, the entry fee is more affordable: USD $10. The deadline is 31 March.

Poetry film festival news round-up

Poetry film festival season is now in full swing. Major festivals are just ’round the corner in Vienna, Berlin, Mexico City, and Athens.

poster featuring Motionpoems

First up is the biannual Art Visuals & Poetry Film Festival scheduled for 29 November to 1 December in Vienna. Though mainly a German-language event, this year it includes a special focus on the US-based production company Motionpoems.

Then it’s time for the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in Berlin, whose full programme is now online. They sent along a press release, worth reproducing nearly in full due the central importance of this festival to the poetry film genre.

Once again, Berlin becomes the centre for the poetry film. From 5 to 8 December, the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival will for the 10th time be presenting the poetry film in all its facets in the Kino in der KulturBrauerei cinema. For the first time the current poetry film from Germany is the centre piece of the festival. Poetry film creation in the United Kingdom will be given a special spot in the limelight. The programme is now online. And Tickets go on advance sale in mid-November.

FESTIVAL OPENING
THU 5 Dec | 20.00 | Kino in der KulturBrauerei

Guest of honour will be Jochen Kuhn, artist and film maker. A voice of contemporary German poetry, Özlem Özgül Dündar, is reading her latest poems. The music of the British and Berlin based multi-instrumentalist Rowan Coupland is often referring to poetry.

GERMANY-WIDE COMPETITION
Part 1: Yearned-For Places FRI 6 Dec | 19.30 (Repetition SAT 7 Dec | 14.30)
Part 2: Common Values SAT 7 Dec | 19.30. (Repetition SUN 8 Dec | 14.30)
all in Kino in der KulturBrauerei

From more than 500 submissions from all over Germany the Programme Commission has chosen the best poetry films for the Competition. The international Jury of three will be awarding the prizes to the winning films at the awards ceremony on 8 December.

AWARD CEREMONY
SUN 8 Dec | 20.00 | Kino in der KulturBrauerei

The international Jury, comprising Jana Cernik (AG Kurzfilm), Charlotte Warsen (poet) and Tim Webb (filmmaker), will be awarding four prizes: the ZEBRA Prize for the Best Poetry Film, donated by the Haus für Poesie, the Goethe Film Prize, donated by the Goethe Institute, the Prize for the Best Film for Tolerance, donated by the German Foreign Ministry and the Ritter Sport Film Prize, donated by Alfred Ritter GmbH & Co. KG. Musical accompaniment for the evening will be provided by F.S. Blumm.

FOCUS UK
We Are Poets FRI. 6.12. | 5 pm
Very British FRI. 6.12. | 10 pm
State of the Art SAT. 7.12. | 5 pm
Stiff Upper Verse SAT. 7.12. | 10 pm
all in Kino in der KulturBrauerei

The country focus this year is on the United Kingdom. The programme ‘State of the Art’ shows the latest British productions, curated by the poets and film makers Chaucer Cameron, Helen Dewbery, Lucy English and Sarah Tremlett. The ‘Very British’ programme is a Best Of from the past few decades of the British poetry film. The documentary ‘We Are Poets’ by Daniel Lucchesi and Alex Ramseyer-Bache celebrates its German première at the festival. In ‘Stiff Upper Verse’ the British poets Simon Barraclough, Lucy English and Roseanne Watt will be reading in English, Welsh and the dialect of the Shetland Isles.

PRISM
Journey in the Mind FRI 6 Dec | 19.30
Transit SAT 7 Dec | 17.00
Parlour Games SAT 7 Dec | 19.30
Interrelations SAT 7 Dec | 22.00 | all in Kino in der KulturBrauerei

The Programme Commission has selected 35 films for Prism; three programmes present the broad spectrum of the German poetry film including animations, experimental films and features. The programme ‘Transit’ shows documentary portraits of poets.

NEW TALENTS
design akademie berlin & Hochschule Anhalt, Dessau FRI 6 Dec | 17.00
UdK Berlin & KHM Köln FRI 6 Dec | 22.00
HFBK Hamburg & Hochschule Düsseldorf SAT 7 Dec | 14.30
HFK Bremen & Hochschule Mainz SAT 7 Dec | 22.00
Bauhaus-Uni Weimar & HBK Braunschweig SUN 8 Dec | 16.00
all in Kino in der KulturBrauerei

Colloquium: The Eye of the Poem SUN 8 Dec | 11.00 | Haus für Poesie
Master Class: Between Film and Poetry FRI 6 Dec | 14.00 | Haus für Poesie

The poetry film is a popular genre at universities and film academies. Students at ten German higher education institutions will be showing poetry films made in the course of a collaboration over a year. In the Colloquium Anna Anders (UdK Berlin), Sophie Maintigneux (KHM Cologne), Ulrike Almut Sandig (poet), Tim Webb (Royal College of Art) and Sarah Tremlett (Liberated Words CIC) will be discussing the position of the poetry film in German and British higher education institutions. And the director Jochen Kuhn will be giving a poetry film master class.

FESTIVAL POEM: [native vegetation a natural resource]
SUN 8 Dec | 17.00 | Kino in der KulturBrauerei

In response to ZEBRA’s call for entries, film makers have submitted their film versions of this year’s festival poem, [dieses regionale getreide] ([native vegetation a natural resource]) by Daniel Falb. Film makers Zihrong Lu, Gruppe Leuchtstoff, Holger Mohaupt and Gabriele Nugara will present their film versions and be talking to the poet about poetry and film. You can read the poem on lyrikline.org.

WORD PICTURES – A ZEBRA NIGHT OF READINGS
FRI 6 Dec | 22.00 | Kino in der KulturBrauerei

Poems by Özlem Özgül Dündar, Adrian Kasnitz, Ulrike Almut Sandig, Kathrin Schmidt and Raed Wahesh are the basis of this year’s films in the Competition and Prism. In the ZEBRA Night of Readings the poets will be reading their texts and talking to Alexander Gumz about making films based on poems.

PROGRAMM FOR CHILDREN AND YOUNG POEPLE
Media Workshop: The Spirits We Conjured up
WED 4 Dec | 9.00 | Haus für Poesie
Sorcerer’s Apprentices in the Moor of Horror: Programme of Ballads
THU 5 Dec | 9.00 | Kino in der KulturBrauerei
Holes in the Head: Programme in Focus Language English
THU 5 Dec | 9.30 | Kino in der KulturBrauerei
I Made It Myself: Films by Children for Children
FRI 6 Dec | 9.00 | Kino in der KulturBrauerei
ZEBRINO Competition FRI 6 Dec | 9.00 | Kino in der KulturBrauerei
Poetry Workshop Writing Netflix! FRI 6 Dec | 9.00 | Haus für Poesie
Workshop Slam: Rucksack and a Journey FRI 6 Dec | 9.00 | Herder-Gymnasium

The Best Poetry Film for Children and Young People will be chosen by the young audience themselves in the ZEBRINO Competition. There will also be a colourful programme of workshops and films for Berlin schoolchildren with, among others, the Spoken Word artists Bas Böttcher and Nicole May.

Festival Fotogenia poster

As great as it is to see ZEBRA continuing to flourish, now to the point of becoming an annual festival, I’m equally excited to see a new poetry film festival springing up — in Mexico City. Check out FESTIVAL FOTOGENIA, I missed the call-out (sorry) but thanks to social media posts by filmmaker Helmie Stil, this didn’t escape my radar altogether. The description on their website suggests an avant-garde perspective on the genre:

FOTOGENIA, FIRST INTERNATIONAL FILM POETRY & DIVERGENT NARRATIVES FESTIVAL promotes a space with alternative conception of films, a celebration of experimentation and avant-garde framework, the love of curiosity and research of the seventh Art. Everyone is invited, taking into consideration the disruptive nature of the selected works.

We welcome you to watch films in another way!

If you are an audiovisual maker interested in provoking the cinematographic image through the exploration of the frontiers and limits of film narrative, genre, format and the nature of film itself, in order to converse with the viewers in innovative and critical ways to ignite a confrontation between reality and cinematic phenomenon, this is your place to exhibit your passion.

The +Institute [for Experimental Arts] and Void Network present the 8th International Video Poetry Festival 2019

Meanwhile in Athens, the International Video Poetry Festival will be held on the weekend of the 14th and 15th. (But submissions remain open until November 20!) Special events this year will include a screening of videopoems by my co-editor Marie Cravens as well as the touring program of videopoems from around the world that she’s pulled together, Poetry + Video, plus the Margaret Tait 100 program celebrating the first Scottish woman to make feature films, who was also a pioneer of poetry in film. And there will be a videopoetry seminar panel including film-makers, writers, performers, and musicians.

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t include a reminder that submissions are still open for REELpoetry/Houston TX 2020 (Deadline: December 9) and the 2020 Newlyn PZ International Film Festival (Deadline: February 24) .
Newlyn PZ International Film Festival poster

Call for entries: 2020 Weimar Poetry Film Prize

As of November 1, the fifth annual Weimar Poetry Film Prize is open for submissions. And this time, it has its own festival.

Through the new film award, the Literary Society of Thuringia and the study field Multimedia narration of the Bauhaus University 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 should explore the relation between film and written poetry in an innovative, straightforward way. Films that are produced before 2017 will not be considered.

From all submitted films selected for the festival competition three Jury members will choose the winner of the main prize (1000 € Best Animation, 1000,- € Best Video). Moreover, an audience award of 250 € will be awarded.

In 2020, the Weimar Poetry Film Prize will be awarded for the first time as part of its own festival – the International Poetry Film Festival of Thuringia – which will take place from May to July 2020 in several cities in Thuringia. The core program (with the award ceremony) takes place from June 12th–14th in Weimar.

The competition »Weimar Poetry Film Award« is financed by Kulturstiftung des Freistaats Thüringen and the City of Weimar.

Deadline: March 31st, 2020

The Form for submissions [pdf] by e-mail to info[at]poetryfilm.de is coming soon.

The »Weimar Poetry Film Award« call for entries is international. For the submission please send with the other informations a quotable text of the related poem in German or English.

Presentation of awards: June 13th, 2020 at the Lichthaus cinema Weimar.