(64 min TRT)

Header photo credit: Wandering Houses (Casas Errantes), dir. Lilián Pallares & Charles Olsen
Showcase title credit: Clay Nesting Dolls (Poupées Gigognes d’argile), dir. Hélène Matte & Marco Dubé

By introducing various personal ‘antidotes’ to loneliness such as a kitchen light, the sound of a radio, or the flight of cranes, Circles contemplates the perpetual oscillation between loneliness and solace, light and dark, silence and company as something inherent to and shared by humans and nature.

(Christina Rupp, Germany, 2023, 2 min, in English with English subtitles)

World Premiere!

One poet visits the house of her friend, also a poet, in Lisbon. Both migrants from Barranquilla, Colombia, they journey together between clothespins, mango, and waves.

(DIR. Lilián Pallares, Charles Olsen // POEM Lilián Pallares, Lauren Mendinueta, Spain, 2025, 9 min, in Spanish with English subtitles)

US Premiere!

While driving through a Miami car wash built on land that was once part of the Everglades, Campbell McGrath reads his poem on one of America’s great, vanishing wild spaces.

(DIR. Eric Felipe-Barkin // POEM Campbell McGrath, US, 2024, 2 min, in English)

A cross-genre film that darts and skitters, blending language, dance, and music. The impetus for this film, the poetry collection Lizard, blends aspects of contemporary womanhood with facts about various lizard species to question what it means to be a human in relation to other humans, other species, and the planet. Lizard is wild and Lizard is you.

(DIR. Jonah Belsky, ArVejon Jones, Ames Tierney, David Rosenthal, Sarah R Rosenthal // POEM Sarah R Rosenthal, US, 2024, 7 min, in English)

Trailer >

World Premiere!

An outcome of a collaboration between Cadence workshop participants, artist Kamila Kuc, and Cadence Video Poetry Festival, this program of shorts addresses the urgent entanglements of ecology, memory, ancestry, and imagination in a world shaped by crisis and marked by a need for transformation. Emerging from a series of workshops that foregrounded collective inquiry, poetic expression, and embodied reflection, these films offer intimate gestures of care, resistance, and repair.

Through personal archives, speculative futures, rivers remembered and names reimagined, the filmmakers explore how creation becomes a form of survival, how we trace what is vanishing while planting seeds for what might still grow. Whether mourning the loss of indigenous knowledge, witnessing environmental degradation, or offering visual lullabies to future generations, these works resist erasure through tenderness and radical attention.

At once cinematic letters, dreamscapes, and elegies, these shorts invite viewers to listen more deeply: to the land, to the ancestors, to what remains, and to what might be possible still. Together, they form a collective poem: one that shelters grief and wonder in equal measure.

** This program is supported by Dark Spring Studio (London) and Seattle University’s Center for Environmental Justice and Sustainability **

Dream of a Seed (Hannah Villanueva, 2025, 3:39)
A poetic triptych of time, memory, and dance, this film moves between timelines to embody the dream of a seed: its potential, its dormancy, its growth. Through lush imagery and layered soundscapes, it offers a cinematic reflection on transformation, both internal and ecological.

Dear Mom (Victoria Blumenfeld, 2025, 3:30)
Through visual metaphor and personal address, this film meditates on the intergenerational connection between the filmmaker and maternal figures—both human and planetary. As the mother becomes a vessel for memory, care, and ecological grief, Dear Mom asks: what does it mean to nurture in a world unraveling?

Lost and [Somewhat] Found (Diana Fakhoury, 2025, 5:03)
A Palestinian woman turns the lens toward her grandfather’s legacy, exploring how stories, land, and ancestral wisdom are passed down through generations of forced displacement. Weaving archival materials with quiet observation, the film becomes a meditation on cultural survival and the ache of forgetting.

Caring For a River (Nancy Kessler, 2025, 2:19)
An intimate portrait of the Duwamish River becomes an act of witnessing and advocacy. Through poetic voiceover and observational imagery, the film explores the river as a living being—asking how naming, stewardship, and community connection shape the vitality and legacy of the place.

We will learn to call ourselves new names (Emery Joan, 2025, 4:25)
An examination of the politics of naming, belonging, and cartography. Maps blur and names shift as the filmmaker questions colonial logics of place and identity, asking: how do we rename ourselves in a world that has already named – and claimed – so much?

A Video Archive for the Year 20XX, when the last cat dies, marking the end of a species (Argot Chen, 2025, 4:36)
In a speculative gesture toward a future without beloved species, this film places playful domestic imagery of cats interacting with historical artifacts of extinct animals against the backdrop of environmental collapse. At once surreal and deeply felt, it creates an imagined archive for a world on the brink, filled with humor, grief, and absurd tenderness.

Bloom (Kate Clark, 2025, 4:58)
A lyrical and layered meditation on creation, destruction, and the desire to pass beauty forward. Through a painter’s gaze and a subtle whistling voice, the filmmaker reflects on flowers blooming amidst planetary grief, drawing connections between inherited trauma, ecological collapse, and the longing to create life in a dying and growing world.

Image credit: Dream of a Seed, Hannah Villanueva

World Premiere!

New Growth is a celebration of Black womanhood that considers Black hair as an ancient and undying form of political resistance, self-expression, and a labour of love.

(DIR. Timiro Mohamed, Faisa Omer // POEM Timiro Mohamed, Canada, 2021, 3 min, in English with English closed captions)

Premiere status!

Articulated through sign language, Clay Nesting Dolls speaks to the space where mothers and daughters merge, powerful and vulnerable, like the earth.

(DIR. Hélène Matte, Marco Dubé // POEM Hélène Matte, Canada, 2023, 1 min, in French & Sign Language with English subtitles)

World Premiere!

Four significant poems written by four authors were broken into lines and hidden in hundreds of films until they were found and restored.

(Dmytro Bondarchuk, Ukraine, 2025, 8 min, in English with English intertitles)

Cadence Video Poetry Festival is a series of screenings, workshops, and discussions on the genre of video poetry during National Poetry Month.

Cadence approaches video poetry as a literary genre presented as visual media that makes new meaning from the combination of text and moving image. Featuring screenings, an artist residency, generative workshops for youth and adults, artist gatherings, and a virtual poetry bookshelf, Cadence fosters critical and creative growth around the medium of video poetry.