~ Nationality: United States ~
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.
Weighing In by Rhina Espaillat
An uplifting animation about age, gravity and being human, Weighing In is from a poem by Dominican-American writer Rhina Espaillat. The film was directed by Casey McIntyre for MPC Creative in Los Angeles in partnership with Motionpoems. It was especially designed as a film for children. The poem can be read on the page here.
Childhood’s End by Howie Good
I LOVE this new videopoem! Belgian artist-composer Marc Neys (aka Swoon) is of course a Moving Poems regular, as is retired journalism professor Howie Good — one of the most productive poets I know. The fit of images to words hits that sweet spot half-way between random and literal, and the font seems chosen for maximum contrast in feeling with the dark content of the text.
The video does double duty as a trailer for Good’s new collection, a chapbook/pamphlet from Laughing Ronin Press called Heart-Shaped Hole.
The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry
There is balm to be found in this poetry film from Wendell Berry‘s deep and enduring poem, The Peace of Wild Things. Berry has a close connection to rural Kentucky USA, where he was born in 1934 and has maintained a farm for over 40 years. It is his own voice in the soundtrack.
The animation is touchingly childlike, directed by UK artists Charlotte Ager and Katy Wang. The project was produced by The On Being Project, a non-profit initiative. Music and sound is credited to David Camp. In-depth process notes on the making of the film can be found here.
I found The Peace of Wild Things among a fine Top Ten of films from classic poems published recently on the magazine side of our site. These films were selected by Paul Casey and Colm Scully, organisers and judges of the Ó Bhéal Winter Warmer poetry festival and poetry film competition in Ireland.
blue jay by Anthony Matos
A poem accompanied by a visual story, blue jay is written and directed by Anthony Matos in Maine, USA. He describes the film as “a story about three strangers trying to overcome different forms of grief and loneliness.”
From his bio at FilmFreeway:
My love for film grew from my love of poetry and the Walt Whitman and Mary Oliver collections I read in high school. I lived through these poets and craved to be able to appreciate life and the moment around me as they did.
Poetry films are most often very short and small-scale in production. By contrast, Blue Jay is over 12 minutes and involved a substantial cast and crew. In these ways it more closely resembles a well-produced narrative short.
The combination of poem and story is an interesting approach, and I find this touching film well worth the time in watching.
