~ Nationality: United States ~
Hidden Life by Elina Petrova
Hidden Life is written and spoken by Ukrainian-born Elina Petrova, now in Houston, USA. The film is by Chap Edmonson, a native of that city. The film was in part inspired by Terrence Malick’s 2019 feature film A Hidden Life, a favorite for both poet and film-maker. The epigraph to that film is a line from George Eliot’s classic novel Middlemarch:
…for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
Petrova’s bio gives her home town as Donetsk, stating that “she became an American citizen in 2014, but remains a citizen of the world.” Also from her bio:
A frequent Pushcart Prize nominee and a finalist for the post of Houston Poet Laureate in 2015… She was appointed Austin International Poetry Fest’s Featured Poet in 2019 and has been featured in the Huffington Post’s “Five Poets You Need to Know About” as one of Houston’s important emerging poets.
Chap Edmonson’s bio from the film’s notes at YouTube:
Chap Edmonson is an award-winning filmmaker based in Houston. His films have been screened in Cannes, Paris, Alfred, Los Angeles, and Houston (Calm Remains, 2021, and You are Art, 2019). Chap’s work is rooted in a deep desire to connect with those who have come before him. Through the use of unconventional compositions and soundscapes, he creates films that tell dynamic stories of a rich history, the future, and points where they intersect.
He is interviewed about the film here.
The film was produced in association with Aurora Picture Show and Public Poetry Houston, which runs the yearly REELpoetry film festival.
Only by Rebecca Foust
A poetry film by interdisciplinary artist Maxine Flasher-Düzgüneş based on the title poem of Rebecca Foust‘s seventh book, Only (Four Way Books, 2022). Kevin Martinez was the videographer. It was shot at Limantour Beach, California in April 2023.
The publisher’s description does make the book sound intriguing:
Urgent from the outset, Rebecca Foust’s ONLY insists that the only thing worth writing about is everything. Prompted to confront what she does not know, the speaker lists, “Null. All. What’s after death or before.” This book scales the cliff-face of adulthood, that paradoxical ascent in which the longer we live the less we know of life, in which we find that each of us is only ourselves and yet delicately interconnected with everyone, everything, else. These candid lyrics ponder our broken political systems, family (dys)function and parenting challenges, divergent and intersecting identities, the complexities of sexuality and gender, natural refuge and climate catastrophe, and in general what it means to be human in a world that sometimes feels as if it is approaching apocalypse. At the ledge of this abyss, however, Foust reminds us of the staggering beauty of life, the legacies of survival in the echoes of care that outlast us: “I came / to the canyon rim and saw // how best to carry you: I let the stone go.”
Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye
Naomi Shihab Nye reads her own deep and beautiful poem Kindness in this excellent animated film by Ana Pérez López, a Spanish illustrator living in London. Sound and Music is by Chris Heagle. The piece is from a series of poetry films produced by the On Being Project. Others from the series have previously been featured here at Moving Poems.
Caterpillar Suit by Lina Ramona Vitkauskas
A 2020 videopoem by Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, not shared here till now due to an almost criminal oversight, considering how good it is. In 2021 it was a finalist at the 9th International Video Poetry Festival in Greece and the International Migration & Environmental Film Festival in Canada. Vitkauskas notes that it was
Inspired by Latvian artist, Elina Krima + sculpture artist Walter Oltmann.
First cinepoem of 2020 explores what it means to wear the suits of natural instinct, moving through familial separations (especially in light of children being cruelly separated from parents in US). This is perhaps the tip of fear we collectively recycle for the coming decade.
We’ve shared some of her other work over the years, but do explore Vitkausas’s Vimeo page for much more.
Singularity by Marissa Davis
Singularity is a wonderful animated film from UK artist Lottie Kingslake and US poet Marissa Davis. Featuring a marvelous spoken and musical voice performance by the multi-talented Toshi Reagon, the film is a touching ode to life’s interconnections.
Produced by the On Being Project, it was also a part of Maria Popova‘s project The Universe in Verse.
The poem can be read towards the bottom of this page at Popova’s website The Marginalian.
Afterimages by Mackenzie Duan
love everything about this animation by Evan Bode, though the first time I watched I wasn’t completely sold on the high school-aged poet Mackenzie Duan’s voiceover. On second viewing, I changed my mind, discovering, as Bode evidently did, that a youthful lack of assertiveness can code as sincerity and a kind of wisdom when one absorbs it in the overall context of the sound design, the intense colors, and most importantly the gorgeous lines of poetry. The film was created for Season 4 of the literary magazine Counterclock‘s Patchwork: Film x Poetry project,
a nine-week interdisciplinary arts fellowship open to filmmakers and poets. Filmmakers and poets are paired together to create original film-poems, or short films inspired by poetry. In the first half of the fellowship, each poet works to produce an original poem informed by both their and their partner’s creative interests; in the second half of the fellowship, each filmmaker works with their partner to adapt their partner’s poem into a short film.
Visit the film’s page at Counterclock to read the poem and bios. Here’s a snippet from the former:
Behind us, the hills
slope in brushstrokes over a lake,
soft and washed out, like the placefires go after burning.
Our bodies become stations of lightwhen the sun dips.
Table for One by Carol Ann Palomba
Selected for the 2023 Haiku North America Haibun Film Festival. Browse the other selections.
Matt Mullins directs a film that we loved for its subtlety, its mastery of the poetry film genre, and its haiku spirit. In the end, it wasn’t a difficult decision to award it Best of Show. Jane Glennie found it “Carefully thought out and very subtly handled. The boiling water is utterly compelling within the stillness of the scene. The soundscape works really well, and the cuts to the haiku text powerful.” James Brush added, “I also like the very ordinariness of the shot. I imagine the speaker standing at the stove just staring and maybe not really seeing, his mind wandering. We’ve all been there, right? I guess that’s why it resonates so much for me.” As for me, I found the film grew on me the more I watched it: a minimalist masterpiece.
Director’s Statement: “Things come to a boil.”
Carol Ann Palomba has been published in anthologies and numerous journals, including Acorn, Frogpond, Haibun Today, Heron’s Nest, Mayfly, Modern Haiku, and Presence. She received third place in the 2020 Harold G. Henderson Haiku Contest and honorable mentions in Sonic Boom’s 4th annual Senryu Contest and the 2017 H. Gene Murtha Memorial Senryu Contest. Carol Ann is a member of the Haiku Poets of the Garden State and helps facilitate the New Jersey Botanical Garden’s haiku installation during Poetry Month. She’s thrilled that her haibun, “Table For One,” was chosen to be adapted into a short film and thanks the judges, the director, and Moving Poems. She enjoys playing darts and sounds much taller on the phone.
Matt Mullins makes videopoems, plays music, and writes. You can see more of his work at vimeo.com/mattmullins.
Unremembered by Marjorie Buettner
Selected for the 2023 Haiku North America Haibun Film Festival. Browse the other selections.
From Dutch director Pat van Boeckel, who honed his craft in the documentary film genre before branching out into video art. His documentaries have been broadcast on Dutch public television and showcased at festivals, covering diverse topics such as indigenous peoples and ecology, with a philosophical undercurrent. His video installations delve into the complex relationship between humanity and the natural environment, exploring contemporary life through the lens of lost values and other forgotten elements of modernization. His works are notable for their simplicity, which stands in contrast to the fast-paced and ever-changing visual culture of today. His focus on the experience of time and place is central to both his documentary and video art works.
Judges’ statement: “Some really imaginative imagery and ideas. We particularly loved the layered reflections and shadows when the finger is drawing a flower on the window, and the ‘kiss’ of the rose leaf was totally captivating. We also loved the hand within a hand within a hand of the shadows and hand holding the cast of a hand. These images had a haiku-like quality all their own.”
Marjorie Buettner is a Pushcart nominated, award winning haiku, tanka and haibun poet who has published widely throughout the U.S. and U.K. and has previously been an editor for the online journal Contemporary Haibun Online. She has taught haiku and tanka at the Loft in Minneapolis and has presented various poetry workshops throughout Minnesota. Her collection of haibun, Some Measure of Existence (published by Red Dragonfly Press, 2014), won first place in the 2015 Mildred Kanterman Merit Book Awards; it was also nominated for the Minnesota Book Awards. She has a collection of haiku and tanka published by Red Dragonfly Press: Seeing It Now, 2008. She writes book reviews for various haiku and tanka journals.
The Longest Journey by Bob Lucky
Selected for the 2023 Haiku North America Haibun Film Festival. Browse the other selections.
Pete Johnston’s other contribution to the festival, along with The Gone Missing. He says: “I loved reading through the haibun, a format that was new to me, and I was immediately struck by these two poems because I could think of a way in. I have a large collection of train video from my personal archive, from different journeys I’ve taken—on the east coast and through the UK, and any time I get to use my vast collection of largely useless video I will jump at it. I just loved the sardonic tone in Bob’s work—it put a smile on my face and I loved working with the words and images to create the piece.”
Jane Glennie: “Great audio reading of the text and careful typography of the haiku text on screen. Good positioning and delicate without needing extra help to be legible against the background.”
Bob Lucky is the author of Ethiopian Time (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2014), Conversation Starters in a Language No One Speaks (SurVision Books, 2018), and My Thology: Not Always True But Always Truth (Cyberwit, 2019). His work has appeared in Rattle, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Otoliths, Die Leere Mitte, SurVision Magazine, and other journals. He lives in Portugal.
