Noho Mai by Peta-Maria Tunui
Winner of the 2020 Ó Bhéal Poetry-Film Competition, Noho Mai is a simple, slow and gentle piece, balm in troubled times. It is spoken in the Māori language (te reo), with English subtitles to be found in the closed captions (bottom right of the Vimeo player).
The project was initiated and facilitated by Charles Olsen and Lilián Pallares. Charles is a New Zealander now living in Spain. Conceived at the start of the pandemic, it became an online collaboration between artists in the two countries. The poem was written by Peta-Maria Tunui as part of an exploratory workshop process that also involved contributions from Waitahi Aniwaniwa McGee, Shania Bailey-Edmonds and Jesse-Ana Harris.
Charles has written at length about the film here.
waxing gibbous 97% illuminated by Yolanda Movsessian
This film by Mitchell Collins, with poetry and recitation by Houston-based poet Yolanda Movsessian, won the Judge’s Prize at REELpoetry Houston 2022.
Utility Pole by Fiona Tinwei Lam and Mary McDonald
A very effective collaboration between two Canadian poetry filmmakers, Mary McDonald and Vancouver poetry laureate Fiona Tinwei Lam. Here’s the description from Vimeo:
Utility Pole is a poetry film collaboration between poet Fiona Tinwei Lam and poetry filmmaker Mary McDonald. Utility Pole explores the transformation of trees into the poles that hold our communications, the many branched network that connect us, as the trees have been severed from each other and their own living networks.
The soundscape is a binaural, 360 soundscape featuring a mix of urban forest sounds, with the sounds of technology today and the pointed call of Morse code, our earliest technologically enabled transatlantic communication. Morse code recording is from Freesound.org credits, Bryce835.
This was featured at the indispensable Poetry Film Live site. Go there to read the poet-filmmakers’ bios. As they note, the text of the poem appears in Tinwei Lam’s third collection, Odes & Laments.
Bullets by Brayden
For World Poetry Day, here’s an Ohio preschooler’s poem animated by Ukrainian artist Stas Santimov. It’s from a project called Preschool Poets:
Old snakes, loose teeth, hot tubs, and ugly people in your face.
This is the world when you are four.For nearly a decade, resident artist Nancy Kangas led a poetry program for preschool-aged children at Columbus Early Learning Centers on the near east side of Columbus. She was struck with how clearly her kids wrote about what they loved and feared. They want bullets to relax, lions to roar, and kids to climb up to the sun.
Nancy and documentary filmmaker Josh Kun asked award-winning international artists to animate these poems, and the resulting hand-crafted animations show a depth and complexity of expression we don’t expect from four-year olds. The films are fueled by the children’s untethered imaginations, but they open a portal to the real world of growing up in the inner city.
Thanks to Maria Popova for highlighting this. You can read the text of the poem there, or at the project site.
Scratching at the Surface of Tears by Jill Munro
Filmmaker Karen Dennison writes in a blog post,
As part of Abegail Morley’s series of posts on The Poetry Shed on the theme of Unlocking Creativity, I compiled a film as a prompt with a call out to poets to respond. Jill Munro wrote a fantastic poem in response and here is the resulting film poem.
Click through for the text of the poem and a short biog of Munro.
