Moving Poems’ first piece by a Catalan poet is one of the competition films in the upcoming 6th ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival, nominated in the category “Best Debut.” The collaborative process by which it came into being sounds fascinating—part accident, part ekphrasis:

A fora(Outside), is a text by the poet Albert Balasch. A few years ago, Balasch began a series of collaborations with the painter Tià Zanoguera. It was from this collaboration that the idea of adapting the text to comic form arose. Zanoguera then created a long series of paintings and drawings that gave birth to the project. In the end, the project did not come to fruition, but the filmmaker and editor Marc Capdevila thought about the possibility of animating the pages and paintings that had been produced. And in this way they constructed a short-film combining poetry, painting and 2D animation.

The challenge in doing the project was to bring the paintings to life and create a stimulating rather than a narrative universe. How can a painting be brought to life? How can you give life to an individual line or to that essence of a picture that cannot be reproduced? And how can you go beyond a literal illustration of the text?

Zanoguera and Capdevila took photographs of the painting and worked on them with animation software. Then Balasch reduced the text to a script in search of ellipsis.

The result of all this process is a short-film that aims to maintain the texture of the original paintings, the expressivity of the brush strokes and the vitality of the range of colours.

In short, the result is A fora(Outside), a brief journey.

There’s also a version on Vimeo without the subtitles.