~ News and Views ~
2013 Visible Verse Festival programme announced
The 2013 VISIBLE VERSE FESTIVAL programme has been announced at the Cinematheque’s website:
Visible Verse, The Cinematheque’s annual festival of video poetry, is back! Vancouver poet, author, musician, and media artist Heather Haley curates and hosts our celebration of this hybrid creative form, which integrates verse with media-art visuals produced by a camera or a computer. The 2013 festival will be selected from more than 150 entries received from artists around the world. As well, we are happy to host Colorado poet and filmmaker R.W. Perkins, who will give an artist’s talk on video poetry and filmmaking.
Video poetry and poetry film festivals and sites continue to pop up all over the world; The Cinematheque’s Visible Verse Festival is proud to maintain its position as North America’s sustaining venue for artistically significant video poetry. As founder of both the original Vancouver Videopoem Festival and Visible Verse, Heather Haley has provided a platform for the genre since 1999, and has also vigorously contributed to the theoretical knowledge of the form. Ms. Haley was honoured for her work with a 2012 Pandora’s Literary Award.
Click through for the full listing of film notes and showtimes. In a post at her blog One Life, Haley goes into a bit more detail about the selection process and the special artist’s talk:
As with last year, we received a record number of entries, over 200. … We received stellar works from South Africa, Thailand, Germany, Belgium, Portugal, Canada, the U.S, Ireland and the UK. With only one night of screenings, I am unable to include a lot of video poems I like.
Fortunately the program does include Literary Movement, a discussion with R.W. Perkins on the process of creating videopoems and the integration of modern filmmaking techniques, Q&A to follow. We will be screening his videopems Morning Sex & Blueberry Pancakes and Small Talk & Little Else. R.W. Perkins is a poet and filmmaker from Fort Collins, Colorado. His work has been published in the Atticus Review, Moving Poems, The Denver Egotist, The Connotation Press, and The Huffington Post Denver. Perkins’s work has been featured at film festivals all over the world, including an 18-state U.S. tour with the New Belgium Brewery’s Clips of Faith Beer & Film Tour in 2012 and at the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in Berlin, Germany. Perkins is also the creator and director of The Body Electric Poetry Film Festival, Colorado’s first poetry film festival, which held its inaugural event in May of this year. For more information on Perkins and his work, visit www.rw-perkins.com. We’re thrilled to have him!
The festival is Sat, Oct. 12 at the Cinematheque in Vancouver. My son has promised to edit a trailer for me, I’ll post it asap. *See* you there!
Filmpoem Festival 2013: Submit!
This is the last call for Filmpoem Festival 2013 – get them in the post folks! We’ve had some incredible entries so far. Check this.
VISIBLE VERSE FESTIVAL 2013 Call for Entries and Official Guidelines
- VVF seeks videopoems with a 12 minutes maximum duration.
- Works will be judged by their innovation, cohesion and literary merit. The ideal videopoem is a wedding of word and image, the voice seen as well as heard.
- Please do not send documentaries as they are outside the featured genre.
- Either official language of Canada is acceptable, though if the video is in French, an English-dubbed or-subtitled version is required. Videopoems may originate in any part of the world.
- Please submit by sending the URL for your videopoem along with a brief bio, full name, and contact information to Artistic Director Heather Haley at hshaley@emspace.com. There is no official application form nor entry fee.
VISIBLE VERSE FESTIVAL Oct. 2013 DEADLINE: Aug. 1, 2013
Deadline nears to submit to Filmpoem Festival
Just a reminder that July 1 is a little over three weeks away. And given how quickly time tends to fly in the summer, anyone who intends to submit work for screening at the first Filmpoem Festival shouldn’t delay! Here are the guidelines [PDF]. Also, it’s not to late to make or change your vacation plans. The Filmpoem Festival will take place on August 2-4 at Dunbar Town House, Dunbar, Scotland.
(Three other poetry film festival deadlines are coming up at the end of July/beginning of August, and one on September 15, so chronic procrastinators can take heart. See the list of deadlines I posted here the other week.)
Review of The Body Electric Poetry Film Festival in The Third Form
For her June “Third Form” column at Connotation Press, Erica Goss reports on the first Body Electric Poetry Film Festival. I’m continually frustrated by the paucity of reviews of poetry film festivals, so I was especially glad to get Erica’s impressions of this one (and of the city of Fort Collins, Colorado, which I’ve never visited). One thing I didn’t realize was that the festival organizer, R.W. Perkins, played a crucial role in keeping open the venue in which it was held:
A town that values culture should have an independent theater, but the Lyric Cinema was in danger of closing is doors last year. They needed a digital projector, which costs approximately $150,000, a steep price for a small business. Enter Kickstarter, with a high-energy video by R.W. Perkins. The Lyric raised the money for its projector, remaining a favorite place for movies and off-beat events (like The Body Electric).
I was also cheered to hear how well attended the festival was. Perkins obviously really knows how design and promote a popular event, even if it includes the dreaded word “poetry” in its description.
The thirty-four video poems that appeared in The Body Electric ranged from sensitive, emotional stories such as “Writer’s Block,” “The Barking Horse,” and “Husniyah” to edgy, animated videos (“Anna Blume”) to the tragically comic (“Portugal.”) Some featured exquisite, hand-made drawings (“Afterlight,” “Becoming Judas.”) I cannot emphasize enough how much these beautifully crafted videos benefit from seeing them on the big screen; for example, details of Cheryl Gross’s drawings for “Becoming Judas,” done in archival ball-point pen, are simply not visible on a tiny computer screen, and the complex layering of text, still images, photographs and rapid film clips of “The Mantis Shrimp” gain strength and power when viewed in the theater.
Read the rest of Erica’s review, which also includes examples of six of her favorite films from the festival.
Swoon film “Drift” wins Trevigliopoesia Festival contest
Congratulations to Mark Neys, A.K.A. Swoon, for winning the sixth edition of “La parola immaginata,” the poetry-film contest associated with the Trevigliopoesia Festival in Italy, with his film Drift. It features a poem by the Irish poet Paul Perry, “For two NATO soldiers who drowned in an attempt to recover supplies from a river in the province of Badghis, Western Afghanistan, November, 2009.” As regular followers of this site know, Swoon’s videopoetry is a particular favorite around here, though honestly, all nine of the finalist films seemed deserving to me. (Thank god I wasn’t one of the judges!) With 65 films in the Moving Poems archive — and I don’t even post everything he uploads to Vimeo — Swoon is without a doubt one of the most productive filmmakers in the poetry-film world. Given that, it’s impressive that his films are also of such high quality, as the jury at Trevigliopoesia recognized.
Producer wanted at Motionpoems
The folks at Motionpoems, the Minnesota-based arts organization responsible for so many stunning poetry films in the last several years, are hiring a producer.
Motionpoems is seeking an ambitious, self-starting Producer to bring artist relations, project coordination, and production skills to a 12-month project, July 2013-June 2014. The Producer will manage production of a dozen new Motionpoems shorts and organize a public screening and online distribution of the films.
Click through for the full description.
Upcoming poetry film festival deadlines
2013 may be an off-year for ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival, but that doesn’t stop them from promoting other people’s festivals on their Facebook page. A recent posting listed all the upcoming deadlines for submission — something we should do here more often, as well:
- FilmPoem Festival in Dunbar, Scotland
DEADLINE: July 1, 2013 - DOCtorCLIP Roma Poetry Film Festival
DEADLINE: July 30, 2013 - Liberated Words Poetry Film Festival in Bristol, UK
DEADLINE: July 30, 2013 - Visible Verse Festival in Vancouver, BC
DEADLINE: August 1, 2013 - Ó Bhéal International Poetry-Film Competition 2013 in Cork, Ireland
DEADLINE: September 15, 2013
The first of these, you may recall, I have some connection to as one of the directors, and I will be attending the festival in August. More about that at a later date. For now, I just want to stress that filmmakers should read the guidelines carefully. Unlike many other festivals, we only consider submissions sent via post: on a DVD, CD or memory stick, and only in .mov or .m4v form. Alastair Cook says: “We’re receiving some great poetry-film from all corners of the world. And we are so pleased to be able to screen it! Now organising the events and workshops for the festival, so pleased to have such an amazing historic venue in such a beautiful town.”
For a more comprehensive list of regular and recent poetry film festivals, see the Moving Poems Links page.
On literary film-making: an evening with The Brooklyn Rail @ 7:00 pm on May 23rd
Visual Verse celebrates artists who use film and video to create work based on short stories and documentaries about writers or films which revolve around poetry. After presenting work by four leading literary filmmakers — Ram Devineni, John Scott, Cheryl Gross, and Immy Humes — a discussion will be moderated by Rachael Rakes, film editor for The Brooklyn Rail. That’s coming up this Thursday evening. The location is 52 Prince St, New York, New York. For more details, see the McNally Jackson bookstore website.
Call for submissions: Ó Bhéal International Poetry-Film Competition 2013
Ó Bhéal (Irish for by word of mouth) is a weekly poetry event in Cork which, since 2010, has also been sponsoring an annual screening of poetry films and videopoems from around the world. This year they’re taking it to the next level, associating with the IndieCork festival of independent cinema in October and holding a poetry-film competition. View the complete guidelines at their website. Here’s the meat of it:
We are now open for submissions. Thirty films will be shortlisted and screened during the IndieCork festival. One winner will be selected by the Ó Bhéal jury.
Deadline for submissions is the 15th of September 2013.
Entry is free to anyone, and should be made via email to poetryfilm [at] obheal.ie – including the following in an attached word document:
- Name and duration of Film
- Name of director
- Country of origin
- Contact details
- Name of Poet
- Name of Poem
- Synopsis
- Filmmaker biography
- and a Link to download a high-resolution version of the film.
Films must interpret or be based on a poem, and have been completed no earlier than the 1st August 2011. They may not exceed 10 minutes in duration. Non-English language films will require subtitles.
Videopoems of place featured at Connotation Press
This month in her Third Form column at Connotation Press, Erica Goss presents “nine poetry films using the following criteria: first, the native language of the poet or filmmaker had to be the language used in narration, and second, the country of the poet or filmmaker had to be prominent in the video.” Her choices are all films I remember with fondness, and it’s interesting to see them presented side by side. I’ve shared so many videopoems at Moving Poems now, it’s easy to lose track of the outstanding ones, so further acts of curation like Erica’s are invaluable. Go look.
McNally Jackson Bookstore in NYC is holding an…
McNally Jackson Bookstore in NYC is holding an event on May 23rd celebrating literary filmmakers. We’re looking to assemble a panel of film/video artists who specialize in poetry films, films based on short stories or documentaries about writers or the writing process. The night will be moderated by Rachel Rakes, film editor at the Brooklyn Rail. If you’re a filmmaker whose work falls into any of these categories and would like to showcase it at the event, don’t hesitate to contact us. Send any inquiries to musa@mcnallyjackson.com.
