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REELpoetry 2019: Review and Compendium
REEL poetry/Houston TX 2019, Houston’s first international poetry film festival, produced by Public Poetry, was impressive in its inaugural year, and already promises to be back next year, and then either annually or biannually after that. The three-day event included live poetry performances, a panel discussion, and a workshop, in addition to featuring more than fifty films, ranging from documentaries and poetry films to videos extending poetry in all directions, from calligraphy and graphic design to dance and art performances, wordless narratives, concrete poetry, and abstract animation. Rather than trying to distinguish poetry films (films of poems) from film poetry (whose lineage derives from early 20th century experimental film and the “pure cinema” of dadaists and surrealists, such as Man Ray), REELpoetry advocates a big-tent approach, preferring an expansive canon rather than a narrow one.
REELpoetry’s eclectic curatorial vision produced a diverse and lively program of 36 films, some of which have already been featured on Moving Poems, or in other poetry film festivals, but also others that highlight new voices and disparate inspirations. Most of the films are available on the web, so what follows is a compendium with links, so that you can watch them in one place. When a particular film is unavailable, a link to the filmmaker/poet’s website or social media is provided instead.
The festival itself commissioned one film, which opened the cinepoetry screenings: 7 Seas, by Kyra Clegg, based on excerpts from Emily Dickinson’s poems about bodies of water.
The festival also gave out two awards with cash prizes, the judges award, which went to The Opened Field (Helmie Stills, filmmaker; Don Bury, poet), and an audience choice award, which went to I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast (Dan Sickles, filmmaker; Melissa Studdard, poet).
Houston is a diverse and eclectic city that is proud of its support for the arts, and both REELpoetry and Public Poetry benefit from that climate, enjoying strong community interest, institutional support, and grant funding. Media coverage for REELpoetry 2019 was impressive, including articles in the Houston Chronicle, Houston Public Media, and Arts and Culture Texas. The festival also provided lodging for poets/filmmakers who attended the event, and the schedule included times and places for mingling and sharing ideas. The inaugural festival set a high bar, and promises even better next year.
Cinepoetry festival program
7 Seas, Kyra Clegg, UK, artist and cinepoet
I could not locate 7 Seas on the web, but there are some short videos on her Vimeo page.
Shiver, Mark Niehus, Australia, filmmaker, composer, and poet
Watch on YouTube.
The Shadow, US, Jack Cochran and Pamela Falkenberg, filmmakers; Lucy English, UK, poet
Watch at Moving Poems.
Echoes, Finland, Hanna-Mari Ojala, cinepoet
Watch on Vimeo.
America Is Hiding Under My Bed, David Mai, director; Barbara West, performer; Julia Vinograd, poet
Watch on YouTube.
Mrigtrishna (Mirage), India, Rantu Chetia, director and poet
I could not locate this film on the web, nor much information about the filmmaker/poet, but I did learn that the film has shown at non-poetry film festivals, and located this brief write-up:
“Mumbai has been the city of dreams for ages. Millions, from every nook and corner of India, come here every day to try their luck in the film world of Bollywood. Only a handful gets their dreams realised though. The rest are left to face the harsh realities of life and the dilemma of their existence. The primary question that constantly hounds them is the motive of their life in Mumbai. The poem tries to portray this very existential query of the protagonist, who is a struggling actor and has left behind the joyous and playful life of the village,” said the director about the film.
Semechki, UK, Eta Dahlia, filmmaker; Iris Colomb, gestural drawings
Watch at Moving Poems.
Wishing Well, Canada, Mary McDonald, filmmaker; Penn Kemp, poet
Watch on YouTube.
Moments, UK, Brett Chapman, director and writer
Watch on Vimeo.
I Remember, US, Lisa Seidenberg, filmmaker
I could not locate I Remember on the web, but you can learn more about the filmmaker on her website.
As We Embrace, Taiwan, Amang Hung, filmmaker and poet
The runtime for the version shown at the festival is listed as 4:36; this longer version is available at Vimeo.
Turkey Teacher, US, David Mai, Director; Barbara West, performer and poet
Watch on YouTube.
14 Sentences, US, Carolyn Guinzio, filmmaker and poet
Watch on YouTube.
Scarce Shelter in the Red Storm, UA, Cindy St. Onge, multimedia artist
Watch on Vimeo.
Home, Ireland, David Knox, filmmaker; Erin Fornoff, poet
Watch on YouTube.
Body Language, US, Margo Stutts Toombs, filmmaker; Roslyn (Cookie) Wells, graphic artist; Lydia Hance, dancer and choreographer; Loueva Smith, poet
Watch on Vimeo.
Ice Fog, US, Vanessa Zimmer-Powell, filmmaker and poet
I could not locate this film on the web, but you can visit her Facebook page, check out her book, or hear her read a poem in Houston for National Poetry month.
I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast, US, Dan Sickles, filmmaker; Melissa Studdard, poet
Watch at Moving Poems.
A Lost Penny, France, Madeleine Clair, cinepoet
Watch on YouTube.
The Names of Trees, US, Pamela Falkenberg and Jack Cochran, filmmakers; Lucy English, UK, poet
Watch on Vimeo.
Plasticnic, Canada, Fiona Tinwei Lam, producer, narrator, and writer; Tisha Deb Pillai, animator; Tinjun Niu, sound designer
Watch on Vimeo.
The Wanderers, US, Ted Fisher, filmmaker; Aoife Lysol, poet
Watch on YouTube.
Hanging, Finland, Hanna-Mari Ojala, cinepoet
Watch on YouTube.
The Opened Field, UK, Helmie Stil, filmmaker; Dom Burt, poet
Watch at Moving Poems.
America, US, Lisa Seidenberg, filmmaker; text by Gertrude Stein
Watch at Moving Poems.
Wind and Plaster, Germany, Burak Kum, filmmaker; Nazim Hikmet Ran, poet
Watch on Vimeo.
Capricorn, UK, Eta Dahlia, filmmaker; Andrey Novikov, original score; Nik Nightingale, calligraphy
I could not locate a film with this title, but you can watch three films on Dahlia’s Vimeo page.
Silicon Valley, Canada, Mary McDonald, filmmaker; Penn Kemp, poet
Watch on YouTube.
Instructions for Soldiers Back From War, US, Jed Bell, director; David Mai, cinematography and editing; Barbara West, performer; Julia Vinograd, poet
Watch on Vimeo.
New Note, US, Ally Christmas, cinepoet
Watch on Vimeo.
Aral, UK, Eta Dahlia, filmmaker and poet
This title could not be located on the web, but the filmmaker does have a Vimeo page.
Without Distortion, Australia, Mark Niehus, director, producer, composer, and poet
Watch on YouTube.
My Cloverfield, Finland, Hanna-Mari Ojala, cinepoet
Watch on YouTube.
Untitled, US, Lisa Maione
I was unable to find this film on the web, but there is a Vimeo page, a website, and an artist’s page where you can learn more about the filmmaker.
Leisure, UK, Derk Russell, cinematographer; Al Barclay, actor; A D Cooper, writer
Watch on Vimeo.
A Family Recipe That Cannot Be Followed or Written Down, US, Elaine Zhang, Director; Tiana Wang, poet
I was unable to locate the film itself on the web, but the project does have a Facebook page.
Wings of Desire is a Poetry Film
Every Angel is terror. And yet,
ah, knowing you, I invoke you, almost deadly
birds of the soul.
Rainer Maria Rilke, The Duino Elegies
When I read that Swiss actor Bruno Ganz died on February 15 of this year, I immediately recalled the iconic photograph of him as the angel Damiel, the character Ganz played in Wim Wenders’ 1987 film, Wings of Desire. Dressed in a black trench coat that hangs past his knees, Damiel stands on the edge of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, looking down on the city of Berlin. Huge white wings erupt from his back.
Wings of Desire is an extraordinary film on many levels – the cinematography, acting, and directing are all of the highest quality. The film’s success, however, is not the result of any of these. The film succeeds because it’s based on poetry.
Poetry determined the film from the beginning. In an article published in the Criterion Collection, Wenders states
I really don’t know what gave me the idea of angels. One day I wrote ‘angels’ in my notebook…Maybe it was because I was reading Rilke at the time—nothing to do with films—and realizing as I read how much of his writing is inhabited by angels. Reading Rilke every night, perhaps I got used to the idea of angels being around.
Needing a screenplay, Wenders approached his old friend and frequent collaborator, Austrian writer and poet Peter Handke. Handke, worn out from having just completing a novel, told Wenders, “I’m completely drained. I don’t have any words left in me. Maybe if you come down here and tell me your story, then I can help you out with a few scenes. But no more; nothing structural, no screenplay.” Wenders and Handke “spent a week thinking up a dozen key situations in a possible plot, and Peter started writing on the basis of that.”
From that initial meeting, the screenplay evolved from weekly dispatches Handke sent to Wenders: “I would get an envelope full of dialogue, without any direction or description, like in a stage play. There was no contact between us; he wrote, and I prepared the film.” Their process sounds remarkably similar to the way in which many video poems arise: one person, usually the filmmaker, creates a film using an existing poem. There is generally little or no contact between the poet and the filmmaker until the film is completed.
Wings of Desire starts with Damiel writing and reciting the opening lines from Handke’s poem, “Song of Childhood:”
When the child was a child
it walked with its arms swinging,
wanted the brook to be a river,
the river to be a torrent,
and this puddle to be the sea.When the child was a child,
it didn’t know that it was a child,
everything was soulful,
and all souls were one.
Gradually, the plot emerges: Damiel (Ganz), weary of his existence as a supernatural being, longs for the messy, sweaty world of humanity. Sitting in a car with his friend, the angel Cassiel (Otto Sander) Damiel imagines what life would be like as a human: “To come home after a long day and feed the cat like Philip Marlowe,” – “to have a fever” – “to get your fingers black from the newspaper” – “to lie – through the teeth!” None of these is enough to convince Damiel to make the plunge; that decision comes when he falls in love with the beautiful Marion, an angel-winged trapeze artist performing in a cheesy, one-ring circus.
As Damiel becomes infatuated with Marion, he begins to hover, unseen, around her, influencing her thoughts and moods (the angels in Wings of Desire possess the ability to read people’s minds). In a couple of unsettling scenes, he enters her circus trailer and watches her undress, once reaching to touch her bare shoulder. Since he’s an angel, we assume that he is completely harmless, but once he’s developed feelings for Marion, his presence in her private sphere seems at least somewhat improper. In abandoning his immortality for the love of Marion, Damiel demonstrates that he shares that view: he can’t keep hovering around, spying on her. He must take his chances in the real world.
Wings of Desire is not only a love story between angel and human, but also a film-poem of place: Berlin in the late 1980s. Angels move freely on either side of the Berlin Wall, a privilege not allowed the city’s human population until two years later. Considering its affect on both the film and the city, the Wall imposes limitations as if it were a poetic form, forcing the filmmakers to create within its boundaries. As Nick Bugeja writes in “Discord and new beginnings in Wings of Desire,” “the Wall towers over the lives of those living in Berlin and Germany, physically and metaphorically constraining them.”
Handke’s “envelope(s) full of dialogue, without any direction or description,” form the overheard thoughts of Berlin’s citizens, edited into poetic snippets. I.e., in one scene, a man with a baby in a backpack thinks, “The delight of lifting one’s head out here in the open” while in another, we hear the thoughts of a woman riding a bicycle: “At last mad, at last redeemed.” When Damiel and Cassiel communicate vocally, it’s in elevated, cryptic speech. To quote Bugeja again, “The effect of Wings of Desire is startling. Its poetry seeps from every frame, as feelings of loss, impotency, and later renewal and warmth spill out.”
Poetry gives Wings of Desire its intuitive leaps and eccentric charm. Poetry elevates Damiel’s decision to leave immortality for love beyond cliché and into the sublime.
When he says, “Now I know what no angel knows,” he means he has found his humanity. This is the value of poetry, and all the arts: they awaken the shared sense of what it means to be human. That seems a fitting way to end a film that began with the word angel scribbled in a notebook.
Call for entries: Film Poetry Competition from Poetry Film Live
Poetry Film Live, the UK-based online journal edited by Chaucer Cameron and Helen Dewbery, has just announced its first competition. It’s also on FilmFreeway:
The Film Poetry Competition is inviting submissions of film-poems. The film should contain all or part of a poem. The poem can be pre-existant, or created as part of the filmmaking process. The emphasis should be on a convincing poetic experience rather than simply technical excellence. We encourage poet-made films, or where the filmmaker has worked closely with the poet.
Film-poetry harmonises words, images and sound to create a new poetry experience … it’s more than spoken words, visual images and sound being in the same room together, it’s their ability to talk to one another that creates the magic in poetry film.
The Film Poetry Competition is in partnership with Poetry Film Live and Swindon Poetry Festival.
Awards & Prizes
Prizes will be awarded at Swindon Poetry Festival on 4th October, at a live screening of all shortlisted and winning films.
The following prizes will be awarded: £400 for the overall winner. Recognition will also be given in the following categories: Single author made film, Animation, Best Newcomer.
The deadline is July 12. You can submit either through the website or on FilmFreeway.
I let Chaucer and Helen talk me into being one of the judges for this, alongside Lucy English. And barring any problems with the UK Border Force or Brexit-related chaos, I plan to be in Swindon in October for the screening. So I hope to see some of you there! And I look forward to viewing your submissions.
“Uprooted” poetry film screening in Bristol, 23 March
There’s a brand-new poetry festival in Bristol this month called Lyra. Lucy English is one of the co-directors, so you know there’s got to be at least one poetry film screening. And sure enough, there is. Here’s the description from the full programme [PDF]:
UPROOTED POETRY FILM SCREENING
Filmmakers for these short poems include Ghayath Almadhoun and Marie Silkeberg, Jan Baeke, Alfred Marseille, Maciej Piatek and poet Hollie McNish.
ARNOLFINI FRONT ROOM
Time: 12:00 – 1:00pm
Price: FreeUprooted is a curated poetry film screening by Liberated Words co-directors, poet Lucy English and videopoet Sarah Tremlett, reflecting on the lives of refugees and migration, and how artists can illuminate and fulfill important roles. Three types of film will be shown: those centred on war zones, those in transit and the views from those both welcoming and ‘settling’ in a new country. The films show how artists can bring another view of the refugee crisis beyond how it is portrayed in the media.
These regional poetry festivals around the UK are really turning into a good venue for poetry films. If you’re able to get to Bristol in two weeks, the whole event sounds grand.
ZEBRA announces new competition for German poetry films
ZEBRA, the biannual poetry film festival, is expanding this year for the first time to include a Germany-only competition and screening in alternate years. I don’t know German, but it seems as if the main competition is for poetry films made in Germany — in any language — since 2016. There’s also a competition for films made from an official festival poem, and it’s not entirely clear, but it appears as if that film must be made in Germany also. Anyway, here’s the call for entries.
Motionpoems announces Season 9 premiere + new “Hothouse” program
Back on February 22 I shared the call-out for Motionpoems‘ new Epiphany Awards, but that isn’t all that the Minneapolis-based arts organization has going on, as their latest newsletter makes clear. For one thing, their upcoming season sounds right up my alley:
Save the Dates for Motionpoems Season 9!
Our ninth season of motionpoems is nearly complete! This season, called “Future: Earth,” features work from brilliant emerging poets and filmmakers. Want to be one of the first to see the new motionpoems? Join us:
- In Minneapolis on May 3rd at the A-Mill for a special, donors-only sneak-preview!
- In Minneapolis on May 10th at Mia: Minneapolis Institute of Art
- LA and NYC: stay tuned for dates and locations TBA!
Then there’s this:
We’re launching a new program: The Motionpoems Hothouse. Our vision for Hothouse is simple: Taking a page from the 48-hour Film Project’s playbook, we’ll challenge filmmakers to capture the raw beauty of a poem and run with it.
For our pilot program, we have selected four dynamic poets and four teams of amazing filmmakers from our vibrant literary and film communities here in the Twin Cities. These filmmaker-poet teams will meet at our premiere on May 10, and the final films will be screened at the WordPlay festival at the Loft on May 12!
To help kick-off this one-of-a-kind event, we’ve launched a Kickstarter campaign. Support local artists and take advantage of our exciting rewards–including cameos, producer credits, and undying gratitude–here!
One thing I’ll say about Motionpoems director Todd Boss: he never seems to run out of new ideas. (Also, his own poetry is pretty great.)
Ian Gibbins, Lucy English interviewed about their videopoems and poetry films
Two very different but equally intriguing poets were interviewed recently in wide-ranging discussions that included questions about their film and video projects. The March 2019 issue of an Australian, bi-annual online literary journal called StylusLit featured Ian Gibbins in conversation with Rosanna Licari, and on March 5 the blog HeadStuff.org posted ‘It was an experiment and I didn’t really know how people would react’ | Interview With Lucy English. Taken together, they present an interesting range of possibilities for how to translate poetry into film/video, and the backgrounds of the poets are a study in contrasts: Ian from the world of science, and Lucy straddling the creative writing and slam/performance divide. It’s hard to select just a couple of quotes, but these should give you a taste:
Constructing the videopoems can happen in many different ways. Sometimes, I will have pre-existing text and then I get an idea for a video sequence which I will then go out and acquire. Sometimes I have some images I’ve collected for no special reason, and then I’ll match them to a pre-existing poem. Sometimes I’ll come up with a concept and then write some text and get the video more or less simultaneously.
The audio part of the video is an important element too. I’ve been putting some of my poems to my own music for a long time now either as performance or as part of art installations. So for some videos, I already have the complete soundtrack. Otherwise, I’ll compose music or soundscapes to suit the project at hand. In general, I prefer to have the soundtrack first and then fit the video to it. This allows me to closely match the visual and aural rhythms of the piece.
I’ve always enjoyed experimenting with animation and some of my early video poems were entirely based on animated text. More recently, I’ve been learning advanced video compositing techniques and 3D animation which allow me to create totally new visual environments from a mixture of pre-existing images and computer-generated scenes or effects. This process is 100% analogous to the way I use found or sampled text in my poems.
Ian Gibbins in conversation with Rosanna Licari
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What I have learned from making short films in collaboration is that there is a visual language which although I was aware of I hadn’t fully taken on board how this works. I was so used to looking at films I wasn’t analysing them. I have now got a deeper insight into how using images affects the viewer and how a film maker doesn’t need to ‘illustrate’ what is in the poem. The language of film isn’t necessarily narrative; we are shown a series of images and we ascribe ‘meaning’ to them. Obviously when writing a novel there is a narrative structure which I don’t need if I am writing a poem or making a poetry film. I have a visual imagination and I have really liked exploring the world of visual images in poetry film. It’s going to be interesting to see if any of this is transferred to my writing of fiction. Perhaps my prose will become more ‘poetic’ and less led by ‘story’!
‘It was an experiment and I didn’t really know how people would react’ | Interview With Lucy English
Poetry + Video: a new touring program of international shorts
This week, Australian filmmaker Marie Craven launched Poetry + Video,
a new touring program of shorts from around the world. This hour-long collection surveys diverse contemporary expressions of poetry in video. A wide range of approaches includes: screen adaptations of page poetry, prose poetry, animations, poetry from found text and media, poetic cinema, text-on-screen, and spoken word.
The program is designed to be highly portable, and easily obtainable on request to screening spaces in any location. It is available for small to medium-sized venues in Australia and other places during 2019/2020.
The premiere screening will be on 4 May, 2019 at Garden Gallery, Murwillumbah, Australia. See the program itinerary for more details, including the outstanding live poets performing on the night. If you are in the vicinity of Murwillumbah, we hope to see you there to celebrate the launch!
The website is admirably complete, with bios of authors and filmmakers as well as descriptions of each film, all indexed in the right-hand sidebar. There’s even a trailer. Check it out.
Now we are ten
Moving Poems was founded on February 23, 2009. The very first post featured a clay-on-glass animation of the Emily Dickinson poem “I heard a fly buzz when I died” by Lynn Tomlinson, which I’d found on YouTube. Tomlinson had made it back in 1989, so quite by chance in my very first post—in which my main intent was to honor and invoke the spirit of one of our greatest poets—I also gave a nod to the pre-digital era, which now seems terribly remote.
Meanwhile, Tomlinson has built up quite a reputation as an animator. I’m grateful that she eventually discovered my post, read my complaint about the low-resolution of the YouTube version, and took the time to upload a higher-res video to Vimeo, so I could swap that in. So many of the older videos I’ve shared on Moving Poems have simply vanished, victims of deleted video hosting accounts, copyright complaints, mad housecleaning impulses… you name it. For a while I was using a dead-links plugin to find and remove those posts. But at a certain point I realized that the historic value of keeping a record of who made what and when outweighed the annoyance to visitors from search engines landing on video-less posts.
It’s kind of an archaeological thing. A long-lived blog or website is just like an ancient city built over previous versions of itself—dead links, missing embeds and all. Moving Poems has its ruins, but they’re part of the attraction! Maybe. Anyway, the point is we all fall apart as we age.
At the moment, Moving Poems and its sister blog Moving Poems Magazine (founded in 2010 as Moving Poems Forum) are doing OK except for the fact that neither has HTTPS authentication (because the current webhost charges too much money for SSL certificates), so I probably only have a year or two to remedy that before some browsers will start refusing to follow links here. Meanwhile, some regular readers of the weekly emailed version of the feed probably forget about our web presence altogether, while other former visitors rarely leave the enclosed commons of social media any more, and forget that there used to be such a thing as the open web. Will any of us be here in ten years? Who knows? Sic transit gloria interneti.
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Here’s an interview I did with Quail Bell Magazine last month, all about videopoetry and poetry film. I talk about the relationship between videopoetry and the internet, how I curate videos for Moving Poems, and what the future might hold for the genre. Check it out.
Call for entries: Cadence Video Poetry Festival
Chelsea Werner-Jatzke recently contacted me to let us know about a videopoetry festival that she’s helping to organize in Seattle, and due to a snafu in communications, I’m a little late in getting this news out. But there’s still time: the deadline for submissions is March 1. Chelsea wrote:
Verse meets visuals in motion at Northwest Film Forum (NWFF) in April 2019. Cadence: Video Poetry Festival, presented by NWFF, programmed in collaboration with Seattle author Chelsea Werner-Jatzke, is a series of screenings, workshops, and discussions on the genre of video poetry, throughout National Poetry Month. Entering its second year, Cadence is growing considerably to fill a gap in the presentation of video poetry in the Pacific Northwest. Featuring four screenings, one each Thursday of the month, the festival’s inaugural Artist in Residence, generative workshops for youth and adults, and a juried selection of open submissions, Cadence fosters critical and creative growth around the oft overlooked medium of video poetry.
Cadence approaches video poetry as a literary genre presented as visual media that makes new meaning from the combination of text and moving image.
The website adds:
Video poetry is language as light. As an art form, video poetry is lucid and liminal—on the threshold of the literary and the moving image. It articulates the poetic image visually, rather than metaphorically—it shifts words from page to screen, from ink to light. A video poem makes meaning that would not exist if text was without image, image without text. It is language-based video work or a video-based poem. Video poetry is a literary genre presented as visual media.
Which is a damn good definition, I thought.
Cadence Call for Entries
NWFF is accepting video poetry submissions for inclusion in the April 18, 2019 screening of Cadence Video Poetry Festival. We are looking for works no longer than 5 minutes that fit within the following categories of video poetry:
- Adaptations/Ekphrasis: Videos created to bring new meaning and dimension to pre-existing poetry. Any poems used for this purpose must be in the public domain or else used with written consent of the author.
- Collaboration: Video poems created in collaboration between a videographer or video artist and poet.
- Video by Poets: Poets creating video from, or as, their writing.
- Poetry by Video Artists: Video artists using text visually or through audio intrinsic to the poetic meaning.
Cadence Video Poetry Festival proudly accepts entries via FilmFreeway.
Submission deadline: March 1Please direct questions regarding submissions to NWFF Artistic Director Rana San at rana@nwfilmforum.org.
The screening of selections from this open call for entries on April 18 is just one of four Cadence screenings, and the two workshops also sound very worthwhile, one on April 6th, and another on April 13 for teenagers. See the website for details about all those events.
This is actually the festival’s second year. In 2018 there was a call (which I missed) for entries from filmmakers in the northwest region.
Motionpoems announces Epiphany Awards for poetry filmmaking
A press release from Motionpoems.
Motionpoems is thrilled to announce the first ever Epiphany Awards: an annual awards program recognizing outstanding international contributions to the field of poetry filmmaking. As the world’s most robust poetry film producer, Motionpoems is thrilled to recognize and support poetry filmmakers with this exciting new series of awards.
A Motionpoems Epiphany Award—aka, an Eppy—is open to any poetry film not produced by Motionpoems, Inc., and will be awarded annually by a rotating jury of Motionpoems collaborators. Honors will be conferred to work deemed uniquely innovative or important in three categories: Adaptation, Production, and Innovation. The inaugural Epiphany Awards will be presented to six top-winning films during a Motionpoems screening, and winners will be invited to attend. Winning films will be awarded laurels, a $500 prize, and recognition across Motionpoems social media channels.
Entrants can submit up to three eligible films on Submittable by April 1, 2019, with an entry fee of $5 to cover administrative costs. We will accept films previously released or distributed online or elsewhere. Eligibility: Films of any length, based on a poem or poems, crediting all collaborators, and completed within two years of the entry deadline are eligible. By entering the contest, Motionpoems is granted the right to screen and share the work, and the entrant attests that relevant rights to show and distribute the work have been obtained.
The jury for 2019, selected to represent diversity and prestige, will be revealed after the awards are announced. For complete information, please visit us at motionpoems.org or our Submittable page.
Having begun as a collaboration between animator/producer Angella Kassube and award-winning poet Todd Boss in 2008, Minneapolis-based Motionpoems has grown into a 501c3 nonprofit arts organization with over 120 films in circulation with hundreds of cast and crew from around the world. Currently producing its ninth season of poetry films, Motionpoems has a longstanding record of partnering with top quality for-profit and nonprofit publishers, film companies, and literary organizations.
