A new international poetry festival is in the works. Entries are due by February 25.
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.
I’m not sure exactly how often it’s held, but the Buenos Aires-based International Festival of Videopoetry (VideoBardo) will be on its fourth incarnation this year, and the deadline for submissions is July 31st. The call for submissions is in Spanish and English:
2012 is a year of deep changes. Humanity suffers from electronic hiperconnection and natural hipoconnection (with Nature and with the Earth that we are part of). Due to these facts, serious and urgent issues about environment, climate and humans have been provoked. We support The Earth Summit 2012 Río +20 of United Nations that will deal all those issues. We must do something as poets, artists and human beings; we must rethink all these matters. That is why our IV International Festival of Videopoetry 2012 has as specific theme “For the Earth”; its purpose will be to become aware of the fact that We Are Earth.
If you’re on Facebook, there’s also an event page with the CFS. And do join the open group for the Visible Verse Festival, where Heather Haley shared this link and shares many other calls, not all of which get posted here.
Poetry-filmmakers have until May 2 to submit works to be screened at the world’s premiere poetry film festival, held biannually in Berlin. The guidelines and entry forms are now online in English and German.
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 juryThis 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.
Day 1 of the International Literary Film Festival
On Monday Nov 14, 60 Writers / 60 Places will be screened on the first evening of the International Literary Film Festival, a festival I founded a few months ago. According to our festival’s website:
60 Writers / 60 Places, a film by Luca Dipierro and Michael Kimball, is about writers and their writing occupying untraditional spaces, everyday life, everywhere. It begins with the idea of the tableaux vivant, a living picture where the camera never moves, but the writers read a short excerpt of their work instead of silently holding their poses. There is Blake Butler reading in a subway, Deb Olin Unferth in a Laundromat, Jamie Gaughran-Perez in a beauty salon, Tita Chico in a dressing room, Gary Lutz at the botantical gardens, Will Eno in a park, Tao Lin next to a hot dog cart, and Rick Moody on a baseball field. The writer and the writing go on no matter what is going on around them.
Watch a trailer for 60 Writers / 60 Places on YouTube
Watch another trailer for 60 Writers / 60 Places on YouTube
Day 2 of the International Literary Film Festival
On Tuesday Nov 15, Doc will be screened on the festival’s second evening. According to our festival’s website:
Doc, a film by Immy Humes, presents a portrait of her father, the legendary forgotten novelist and counterculture icon Harold Louis “Doc” Humes. Doc’s friends and family—including Norman Mailer, George Plimpton, Timothy Leary, William Stryon, Peter Matthiessen, Paul Auster, and Jonas Mekas—weave together a story of politics, literature, protest and mental illness, shedding light on an original mind as well as the cultural history of postwar America.
Watch a trailer for “Doc” on YouTube
Watch another trailer for “Doc” on YouTube
Short Literary Films
Several short literary films will also be screened on the two evenings of the festival. The program for short lit films will be announced soon on http://www.LiteraryFilmFestival.com.
Heather Haley has posted the program for the Visible Verse videopoetry festival, which will be in Vancouver, BC on Friday, Nov. 4 and Saturday, Nov. 5 at the Pacific Cinematheque. A few of the filmmakers’ names were familiar to me from curating Moving Poems (Swoon Bildos, Alastair Cook, Kathy McTavish), but the majority were not, which is exciting: it suggests that my online anthology, extensive as it is becoming, is really only the tip of the iceberg. Not only do I miss a lot of good stuff, but many people never upload their films to a video-sharing site, especially those who are more focused on getting into festivals.
This year’s festival will also include an artist talk/Q&A with Tom Konyves, focusing on his recent Videopoetry: A Manifesto, and a live reading by a vsisiting videopoet, Rich Ferguson.
Incidentally, the Facebook group page for the Visible Verse Festival, source of this information, is a good place to find links to new work, since anyone can join and post to it.
Two new peripatetic film festivals are currently accepting submissions of videopoetry and other poetry-related films. South African videopoet Kai Lossgott is organizing Letters from the Sky: experimental films on climate change, which seeks “experimental film, artist’s film, video art, microcinema, animation, screen dance, video poetry” which address the question:
How does climate change affect your habitat? Participating artists should respond to the brief and the theme of evidence of climate change. In researching a personal but informed response to the topic, dialogue/collaboration with scientists is encouraged. Using film as a medium, the complex issues at hand should be transformed into dynamic but simple audiovisual experiences with both popular and critical merit. The work may not be longer than 4 minutes. Brevity is strongly encouraged.
The original screening will be part of the COP 17 global climate summit in Durban, South Africa, 28 November – 9 December 2011, “as well as Johannesburg and Cape Town. Thereafter, selections of the programme will travel to international film festivals.” The deadline is coming up soon — September 20. See the Open Call for Films and Proposals for more information.
The International Literary Film Festival is scheduled to kick off in Brooklyn, New York in November, and thereafter to travel to Berlin, Leiden, and Cha-am, Thailand over the following 14 months. The organizer, Lee Bob Black, is looking for films in four categories: feature literary film (longer than 60 minutes), short literary film (shorter than 60 minutes), documentary film about literature (longer than 60 minutes), and documentary short film about literature (shorter than 60 minutes). The deadline is October 14. See the website for a submission form and additional details.
Submissions to the Visible Verse Festival in Vancouver are due by September 1. Don’t miss your chance to be part of North America’s premiere videopoetry festival.
2011 VISIBLE VERSE FESTIVAL
Call for Entries and Official Guidelines:
- VVF 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. 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.
DEADLINE: Sept. 1, 2011
- 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 Heather Haley at: hshaley@emspace.com
Like our own videopoem contest, PIFF 2011 challenges filmmakers to make a short film in response to the same poem — in their case, “Four Letters, Three Words” by Brenda Hilton. But their contest is a much more high-powered affair with entry fees and screenings and whatnot, and they also don’t require that the poem be incorporated into the film, only that the film should be a response to it. Here are the rules and regulations.
I’ve just posted two new pages of resources for videopoem and poetry-film makers.
The Poetry film festival list includes websites and, where available, Facebook pages for regularly occurring poetry film festivals. Left off the list, at least for now, are all the more general film festivals to which poetry films might be submitted.
Web resources for videopoem makers includes information on determining what’s free to use, as well as links to free and Creative Commons-licensed film and video, spoken word, sound and music collections. I also include a link to the software I use for downloading videos from the web, but I welcome other suggestions.
Please use the comments here or at the respective pages to alert me about other links I should include. I would also encourage people who regularly use Creative Commons-licensed material to follow the Golden Rule and apply a “copyleft” license to your own work, as well. (I don’t always remember to do this myself, but I should.)
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.
Thanks for helping spread the word Dave.
My pleasure. Who knows — I might even get off my butt and submit one of my own crappy videopoems this year. 
Well, despite the scatological reference, or references, I look forward to viewing your videopoems. 
Thomas Zandegiacomo Del Bel 7:52 pm on December 10, 2011 Permalink |
Dear Dave,
Thank you very much!! We’re looking foward to the new poetry films from all over the world.
All the best,
Thomas