~ Nationality: United States ~
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.
The Gone Missing by Joseph Aversano (Beate Gördes)
Selected for the 2023 Haiku North America Haibun Film Festival. Browse the other selections.
From German director Beate Gördes, who was born in 1961 in Germany, and currently lives and works in Cologne. She studied Fine Arts at the University of Applied Sciences in Cologne. Since 2006, her main focus has been on video compositions combined with electroacoustic sounds. She has participated in exhibitions both nationally and internationally since 1985, including most recently the 2023 COLLAGE ON SCREEN Kolaj Fest New Orleans, USA; 2023 INTERNATIONAL POETRY FILM FESTIVAL OF THURINGIA, Weimar, Germany; 2022 HIER NICHT HIER (with Dagmar Lutz) TENRI Japanese-German Cultural Workshop Cologne, Germany; and 2022 ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival, Berlin, Germany.
Judges’ statement: “Bewitched and glitchy—a mesmerizing film with strong use of layout and a graphic image. Great sound choice, eerie but not too dominating.”
Joseph Salvatore Aversano is a native New Yorker currently living on the Central Anatolian steppe with his wife Asu. His poems have been published in numerous journals and some have been awarded or anthologized. He is the founding curator of Half Day Moon Press and editor of Half Day Moon Journal. We chose five different films that used his haibun, “The Gone Missing,” intrigued that so many filmmakers chose to work with it, and eager to show the variety of approaches that poetry filmmakers can take.
The Gone Missing by Joseph Aversano (Janet Lees)
Selected for the 2023 Haiku North America Haibun Film Festival. Browse the other selections.
Janet Lees is a lens-based artist and poet. Her films have been selected for many festivals and screenings, including the Aesthetica Art Prize, the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival, and Festival Fotogenia. In 2021 she won the Ó Bhéal International Poetry-Film competition. Her art photography has been exhibited around the world and her poetry is widely published and anthologised. She has had two books published: House of Water, a collection of her poems and art photographs, and A bag of sky, the winning collection in the Frosted Fire Firsts prize hosted by the UK’s Cheltenham Poetry Festival.
Director’s statement: I use the camera as a storytelling machine rather than a documenting device. I think film, photography and poetry are among the most important means of creative expression in the Anthropocene. Joseph Aversano’s intriguing haibun ‘The Gone Missing’ seems to me to encapsulate so much of the nature of humanness and life in these times; a sense of living on a knife edge of destructive compulsions. As a photographer and filmmaker I am drawn to damaged, dangerous places, so this piece absolutely struck a chord.
Judges’ statement: We loved the framing, the camera angle, the flickering filtered sunlight and the soundtrack, and admired the build-up to the closing shot, which somehow fully expresses Aversano’s enigmatic haiku.
Joseph Salvatore Aversano is a native New Yorker currently living on the Central Anatolian steppe with his wife Asu. His poems have been published in numerous journals and some have been awarded or anthologized. He is the founding curator of Half Day Moon Press and editor of Half Day Moon Journal. We chose five different films that used his haibun, “The Gone Missing,” intrigued that so many filmmakers chose to work with it, and eager to show the variety of approaches that poetry filmmakers can take.
The Gone Missing by Joseph Aversano (Pete Johnston)
Selected for the 2023 Haiku North America Haibun Film Festival. Browse the other selections.
A Super 8-style film by Pete Johnston, one of two films by him that we selected for the festival. Pete Johnston teaches and makes film at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan. He co-founded the FILMETRY online festival of poetry and film with Cindy Hunter Morgan.
He told us: “Aversano’s piece, the shortest of the bunch, obviously evokes a lot for so many people, hence why it was adapted so many times! I was no different and got to use some old footage and create some new footage to go with it. I’m fascinated to get to see all the versions and it highlights what makes cinepoetry or filmetry a favorite mode of mine, the way cinema can interpret and reinterpret poetry in unique ways artist to artist.”
Judges’ statement: “We liked the balance between playful fun and melancholy that the two scenes create. It all worked together to create a lovely sense of real people that we could actually know and their journeys away from each other. We also appreciated the treatment of the text on screen, which really helped us make sense of the haibun.”
Joseph Salvatore Aversano is a native New Yorker currently living on the Central Anatolian steppe with his wife Asu. His poems have been published in numerous journals and some have been awarded or anthologized. He is the founding curator of Half Day Moon Press and editor of Half Day Moon Journal. We chose five different films that used his haibun, “The Gone Missing,” intrigued that so many filmmakers chose to work with it, and eager to show the variety of approaches that poetry filmmakers can take.
The Gone Missing by Joseph Aversano (Marilyn McCabe)
Selected for the 2023 Haiku North America Haibun Film Festival. Browse the other selections.
Marilyn McCabe’s second full-length collection of poems, Glass Factory, was published by The Word Works in 2016, and her second chapbook, Being Many Seeds, was published in 2020 by Grayson Books. She’s based in upstate New York.
She included this note: “The haiku portion of the haibun form often sounds to me like a whisper. Mr. Aversano’s piece felt so intimate to me that a soft delivery of the prose portion and a silent haiku felt appropriate for the video, and fit perfectly with the video footage of moving mist I captured in the Adirondacks one day.”
Judges’ statement: “Beautiful footage in black and white, the soft floating mist and soft clouds contrasting with the spiky lines of the tree in the foreground, creating an unnerving and strong sense of cataract and uncertainty.”
Joseph Salvatore Aversano is a native New Yorker currently living on the Central Anatolian steppe with his wife Asu. His poems have been published in numerous journals and some have been awarded or anthologized. He is the founding curator of Half Day Moon Press and editor of Half Day Moon Journal. We chose five different films that used his haibun, “The Gone Missing,” intrigued that so many filmmakers chose to work with it, and eager to show the variety of approaches that poetry filmmakers can take.
