With screening events to be held during March 2012 in both Portland, Oregon and Shanghai, China, this festival will celebrate the art of video poetry—the mix of verse and video into a creative form all its own.

Clikc through for the details and guidelines.

The ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival is calling for entries for the 6th competition to find the best poetry films! Entries should be short films based on poems. Prizes in the competition will be awarded to a total value of €10,000. From all films submitted, a Programme Commission will nominate the films for the competition and select the programme contributions. The winners will be selected by an international jury.

The prizes that will be awarded are:

– ZEBRA Prize for the Best Poetry Film, donated by the Literaturwerkstatt Berlin
– Goethe Film Prize, donated by the Goethe Institute
– Ritter Sport Film Prize, donated by Alfred Ritter GmbH & Co KG
– Audience Prize awarded by the radioeins jury

This year, for the first time, the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival will also be making awards for poetry films in the categories »Best First Film«, »Best Film for Tolerance« and »Best Poem Performance on Film«.

The festival is also for the first time inviting everyone to make a film based on the poem [meine heimat] ([my home]) by Ulrike Almut Sandig. The directors of the three best film versions will be invited to Berlin to meet the poet and have the opportunity to present and discuss their films. You can find the poem with audio and translations here.

ZEBRINO – the prize for the best film for children and young people: Children and young people award their own prize. The young viewers will be deciding on the winner of the ZEBRINO, the best poetry film for eight-to-twelve-year-olds.

Closing date for entries for all competitions is 2 May 2012.

All films that are submitted will automatically be entered for all selection procedures!

The 6th ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival will be held from 18 to 21 October 2012 in the Babylon Cinema in Berlin.

Click through for rules and entry forms.

You can enter as many times as you like. From all the entries, we’ll select an indeterminate number of finalists to feature on the main site. Howie has generously offered to give copies of his books Rumble Strip, Anomalies, and Disaster Mode to his top three favorites, with the first place winner getting all three, second place the first two, and third place getting the last. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, I’d love to hear them.

Howie’s academic publications include three book-length studies of film and culture, so I’m grateful for his offer to help judge the contest, as well.

1. The gist

In order to showcase and celebrate diverse approaches to making videopoems and poetry-films, I thought it would be fun to have a contest where everyone would use the same poem in its entirety, either in the soundtrack or as text (or both). Please join us! Post the results to YouTube or Vimeo and either email me the link (bontasaurus[at]yahoo[dot]com) or put it in a comment below, no later than April 15 April 22. I’ll post the winners to the main site.

2. The poem

Fable

by Howie Good

 

A messenger arrived
from a country

colonized by magpies.
I have two sons, he said,

one whose name
means wolf

and one whose name
means laughter.

It felt like rain,
what’s called

a baby’s ear moon,
false angel wing.

They hanged him
in a cornfield.

The world is made
of tiny struggling things.

from Rumble Strip (Propaganda Press, 2010)

3. The nitty-gritty

Howie Good is the author of 27 (!) print and digital chapbooks and three full-length collections of poetry, not to mention the 12 scholarly books he’s written in his other career as a journalism professor, which include several studies of film. For a fuller bio and links to some of his online work, see his blog, Apocalypse Mambo. I am grateful to Howie for giving us carte blanche to interpret his poem however we want.

As stipulated above, I’d like all videos to include the complete poem. They should be true videos or films — no video slideshows, please. You should also have permission for any images, footage, and sounds you might use, or be able to make a strong case that (for U.S. material) your use of copyrighted material is sufficiently transformative as to fall under generally accepted definitions of fair use. Please include Howie Good’s name and a link to his blog in the video description at YouTube or Vimeo.

For details about fair use and loads of links to free-to-use video and audio, please refer to our new page: Web resources for videopoem makers. Of course, I encourage those with the means to do so to shoot fresh footage, compose or mix your own music, etc. But if all you have access to is some free video- and audio-editing software and lots of time and imagination, you can still contribute.

You can enter as many times as you like. From all the entries, we’ll select an indeterminate number of finalists to feature on the main site. Howie has offered to give copies of his books Rumble Strip, Anomalies, and Disaster Mode to his top three favorites, with the first place winner getting all three, second place the first two, and third place getting the last. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, I’d love to hear them.

Send, at your own risk, videopoems and poetry films/preview copies (which cannot be returned) in DVD NTSC format to: VISIBLE VERSE c/o Pacific Cinémathèque, 200-1131 Howe Street, Vancouver, BC, V6Z 2L7, Canada. Selected artists will be notified and receive a standard screening fee.

For more information contact host and curator Heather Haley at hshaley[at]emspace[dot]com or visit the website.

Last Sunday I happened on the website of the Poetry in Film Festival — as it happened, the very day the festival was to be held. It sounds really neat. The unique thing about it was that all contestants were given the very same poem to interpret: “The Briefcase Phenomenon,” by Libby Hart. Films had to be between 4 minutes and 7 minutes in length, and could be in “any genre including drama, comedy, horror, sci-fi, documentary, music video, animation or experimental. Words from the poem can be used within the film but this is not a requirement.” (See the complete rules.) Judging by the brief descriptions, the finalists seem quite different from one another.

With sponsorship from the Australian Poetry Centre, ABC Radio National, and a major Australian movie theater chain, this hardly sounds like a fringe event. However, a Google news search turns up no coverage of it whatsoever. I hope it was a success.

The deadline is July 31. Here’s a New York Times article on the contest. For more, go to YouTube.com/play.

SEE THE VOICE – Visible Verse 10th Anniversary Celebration & Festival Call for Entries and Official Guidelines

Please send in your videopoem by Sept. 1, 2010.

• Visible Verse seeks videopoems, with a 15 minutes maximum duration.
• Either official language of Canada is acceptable, though if the video is in French, an English-dubbed or -subtitled version is required for consideration. Videos may originate in any part of the world.
• Works will be judged by their innovation, cohesion and literary merit. The ideal videopoem is a wedding of word and image, the voice seen as well as heard.
• Please, do not send documentaries as they are outside the featured genre.
• Videopoem producers should provide a brief bio, full name, and contact information in a cover letter. There is no official application form nor entry fee.

Send, at your own risk, videopoems and poetry films/preview copies (which cannot be returned) in DVD NTSC format to: VISIBLE VERSE c/o Pacific Cinémathèque, 200-1131 Howe Street, Vancouver, BC, V6Z 2L7, Canada. Selected artists will be notified and receive a standard screening fee.
For more information, see below, or contact Heather Haley at: hshaley@emspace.com

In 1999 the Vancouver Videopoem Festival, the first of its kind in Canada, began as an effort of the Edgewise ElectroLit Centre, a non-profit literary arts organization dedicated to expanding the reach of poetry through new media with programs such as Telepoetics Vancouver and the Edgewise Café electronic magazine. The VVF became critically regarded owing to its progressive regard for spoken word in cinema, presenting poets both in performance and on the big screen. The audience could explore the merits and distinctions of poetry rendered in these two forms, stage and screen, sparking new dialogue as to the essential nature of poetry. The festival then built upon that foundation, with widened explorations into poetry cinema across national frontiers. They presented significant new works from Europe and the Americas, and continued to offer Canadian audiences a remarkably broad selection of new videopoems from their own country.

Pacific Cinémathèque has been the VVF’s partner since 2000 and throughout the dissolution of the Edgewise. Founder Heather Haley continues to provide a sustaining venue for the presentation of new and artistically significant videopoetry as host and curator of SEE THE VOICE: Visible Verse. And owing to Vancouver’s strength in the film and television production industries, Haley has been able to cultivate critical interest between filmmakers and poets, with positive consequences for both.

To celebrate entering their second decade of showcasing videopoetry, Haley and the Pacific Cinémathèque are presenting two screenings this year as well as poetry performances, a panel discussion and an awards gala, Friday Nov. 19 and Saturday Nov. 20.