~ TARP ~
Upcoming videopoetry and poetry film festivals
Book your tickets! The annual autumn parade of poetry film festivals is about to begin. Some calls are still open: for the Vienna, Ó Bhéal and CYCLOP festivals (see below), and for the as-yet-unscheduled 5th Sadho Poetry Film Fest (deadline: October 30) and International Film Poetry Festival in Athens (deadline: November 20). And don’t forget that submissions to Zata Banks’ PoetryFilm screenings series never close.
September 15-19, Vilnius, Lithuania
TARP Audiovisual Poetry Festival 10: INTER-states
This year‘s special touch – audiozine, which will see poets Dainius Gintalas, Laima Kreivytė, Marius Burokas, Benediktas Januševičius, Agnė Žagrakalytė and others being recorded reading poetry in their favourite settings.
The last day of the festival TARP 10 will be dedicated to TARP academy, together with video poetry researchers Sarah Lucas and Lucy English from Great Britain, andan open discussion with the festival guests. The closing of the festival will be crowned as usual by an open mic readings and the opening of the „INTER-states“ exhibition – because it is just the festival that will end, while poetic states will flutter in the air for long afterwards.
September 30, Minneapolis, MN, USA
Big Bridges Film Festival
Mark your calendar for September 30, 2015 when we will reveal the winners of the Big Bridges Film Contest! The event, hosted by MotionPoems and the Target Studio at the Weisman Art Museum, will include a special screening of selected films from the contest. All are welcome!
More details coming soon at www.BigBridgesWAM.com!
October 4-11, Cork, Ireland
Ó Bhéal @ IndieCork Film Festival
→ Submissions open until September 15
This is Ó Bhéal’s sixth year of screening poetry-films (or video-poems) and the third year featuring an International competition.
Up to thirty films will be shortlisted and screened during the festival, from 4th-11th October 2015.
October 10-11, Worcester, MA, USA
Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival
Rabbit Heart 2015 will once again be at the delightful Nick’s Bar in Worcester, MA! This year there will be two shows–
Showcase Matinee – Saturday, October 10th 12-3pm
Join us for lunch, and check out some of the fantastic material that we wish we had time to share at the awards ceremony (we got SO many good entries this year!) We will screen the best of the best that didn’t fall into prize categories, as well as curated showcases from renowned UK archivist Zata Banks of PoetryFilm. Watch this space for more information on the individual showcases.Awards Ceremony and Viewing Party – Sunday, October 11th 8pm (doors at 7:30)
The show you’ve been waiting all year for – the best of the best, the handing out of trophies, popcorn and fancy dresses, and your lovely emcees Tony Brown and Melissa Mitchell! Come meet your judges and cheer for your finalists – and see who takes home the sparkle-hearted bunny for Best Overall Production.
October 17, Vancouver, BC, Canada
Visible Verse 2015 Festival
Presented by The Cinematheque since 2000, Visible Verse is one of the longest-running video poetry festivals in the world. Video poetry is a hybrid creative form bringing together verse and moving images. Visible Verse selects its annual program from hundreds of submissions received from local, national, and international artists.
On the occasion of the 2015 festival, The Cinematheque says a fond farewell and expresses its great gratitude to Heather Haley, founder of Visible Verse and its curator and host from 2000 to 2014. We welcome Vancouver poet Ray Hsu into his new role as Visible Verse’s artistic director.
November 20 and 22, Kyiv, Ukraine
5th CYCLOP International Videopoetry Festival
→ Submissions open until September 30
The festival programme features video poetry-related lectures, workshops, round tables, discussions, presentations of international contests and festivals, as well as a demonstration of the best examples of Ukrainian and world videopoetry, a competitive program, an awards ceremony and other related projects.
December 5-6, Vienna, Austria
Poetry Filmfestival Vienna (AKA Art Visuals & Poetry Festival)
→ Submissions from German-speaking countries open until September 15
After an inspiring Poetry Film Festival in 2014 we are happy to go on in 2015. What´s new in 2015? We found a new festival location in middle of city center. Metro Kinokulturhaus. It’s one the most beautiful cinemas in Vienna and the result of a new cooperation with Filmarchiv Austria.
Poetry film festival news: Ó Bhéal releases shortlist; TARP plans 24-hour-long festival
There was poetry film festival news out of Ireland and Lithuania this week. Ó Bhéal International Poetry-Film Competition, due to be screened on October 18-19 in Cork, released its shortlist.
The competition shortlist of thirty films which follows, will be screened in two parts, at the Smurfit Theatre in The Firkin Crane, Cork. These have been chosen from over eighty submissions of poetry films completed in the last two years, from twelve countries – Ireland, England, Canada, USA, Ukraine, Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Lebanon, Isle of Man and Macedonia/Croatia. The Ó Bhéal panel of judges will select one overall winner, who will receive the IndieCork festival award for best poetry film, at the awards ceremony. This year’s judges are Paul Casey, Stephen O’Riordan, Rosie O’Regan and Rab Urquhart.
And a post in English at the TARP website outlines the programme for this year’s festival.
Every year the audiovisual poetry festival TARP challenges itself and the audience – this year they will present a unique format of an event. Once the festival lasted for a month and visited the bigger cities in Lithuania, the only festival for interdisciplinary poetry will last for twenty four hours this year – from 9 am on 11 October until the same hour on 12 October in various places in the capital city.
The programme includes a preview of the 2014 ZEBRA festival due to take place in Berlin a week later, hosted by ZEBRA director Thomas Zandegiacomo Del Bel, as well as the opening of an international exhibition of graphic type animation, concerts, performances and more — check it out. It’s full of ideas that other festival planners might benefit from.
Organizers of the audiovisual poetry festival TARP have the right to surprise. Maybe the day has twenty five hours, maybe not read but performed text can have a completely different meaning.
Swoon on leading a videopoetry workshop in Vilnius
Belgian filmmaker and musician Swoon (Marc Neys) gave a two-day videopoetry workshop as part of the TARP festival of audiovisual and experimental poetry in Vilnius, Lithuania earlier this month. His blog post about the experience should be of interest to videopoets and poetry teachers alike.
The participants get to experience the importance of timing, the power of coincidence, and, hopefully, the fun of playing with words and images. After that two groups were formed (making sure each group had someone familiar with film and/or video and someone willing to write) to work on a project of their own. Both groups took the results of the writing experiment as a starting point; One group used footage shot by one of the participants and combined two ‘poems’ of the experiment. In doing so creating two streams of thoughts played out against two streams of images. The other group wrote a new poem (using the same basic idea) and added self filmed footage and filmed some new material the day before the second part of the workshop.
The second evening we recorded the poems. Each group explained and showed their work in progress. Giving me a change to suggest, answer questions and help out where needed.
