A poetry film produced as a progression from the Disappear Here project – 27 film-poems about Coventry Ringroad.

Director Bio:
Adam Steiner’s poetry and fiction appear in Rockland Lit, Proletarian Poetry, The Next Review, Fractured Nuance zine, BoscRev: 4, The Weary Blues, The Stare’s Nest, ShoutOut UK, 3:AM, The Cadaverine, Spontaneity, Abridged 0-13, The Literateur, Nostrovia! SquawkBack, NOUS. Anthologies: Interpal – Palestine Verses, Fugue 1 (Siren Press), Poems Underwater, Stepaway – Voicewalks (Durham University).

Director Statement:
From work even the strongest horses die
– Czech proverb

An author-made poetry film based on the poem “As We Embrace Thousands Are Dying ALL Over the World” with chanting in many languages to form a kind of poetry mantra.

Director Bio:
Born and raised on the scenic east coast of Taiwan, Amang loves writing poetry, climbing mountains, swimming in the ocean, taking videos, the wilderness and anything wild. She is the author of four volumes of verse, “On/Off: Selected Poems of Amang, 1995-2002” (2003), “No Daddy” (2008), “Chariots of Women” (2016), and “As We Embrace Thousands are Dying All Over the Earth” (2016). Her work has appeared in various print and online journals in Asia and the United States. Her first documentary, “Express Mail, Address Unknown” was featured at the 2011Women Make Waves Film Festivalin Taiwan. Poetry film Hot Spring Museum screened for one month at Beitou Hot Spring Museum. Poetry films Amniotic Fluid, oceans apart & MORE THAN ONE screened online by AXW Film Festival.

Director Statement:
This film is based on the title poem of my poetry collection, As We Embrace Thousands are Dying All Over the Earth (2016). Like the poem, the film mulls the problems and possibilities of love in our increasingly ruthless world. Indeed, the world seems bent on going to hell in a basket. And yet, for all my fears of the future, I have come to see a glimmer of hope in the quiet virtues of small things and the selfless acts of ordinary people reaching across the real and imagined lines that divide us. Which is to say, the meaning of this poem has changed for me. But as the poets and philosophers have long pointed out, life is ever unpredictable. Which is why I have filled the film with sequences of random numbers, and why the one or two cherished lines of the poem I do quote are read in so many languages. As if with a mind of its own, my poem has become a mantra.

A lonely person unexpectedly takes a journey to reconnect with life.

Credits:
Animated and Directed by Beth Peloff
Music by Dua Saleh

Director Bio:
Beth Peloff is a video maker and teacher who works in both animation and documentary.  Her films have played at film festivals regionally and nationally. She is a 2017 recipient of the Jerome Foundation Film and Video Grant.

Poet Bio:
Dua Saleh is a multidisciplinary performing artist based in Minneapolis. Recently signed to Against Giants, Saleh transcends traditional classifications through art. This work is in direct conversation with people at the margins of reality. Saleh has won the 2017 VERVE Grant, contracts with agencies such as Button Poetry, song premieres with stations such as Minnesota Public Radio, and directing positions with companies like Pillsbury and 20% Theater.

A poetry-film by Brandon Jordan Brown

Director Bio:
Brandon Jordan Brown is a former PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow and winner of the 2016 Orison Anthology Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in West Branch; RHINO Poetry; Sycamore Review; The Journal; Forklift, Ohio and elsewhere. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Brandon now lives in Portland, Oregon. Find him on Twitter @brownbrandonj and at brandonjordanbrown.com.

The animation is about a poem. The poem is about a memory, a memory about a friend, monkeys, and the spoons of a woman.
Mainly it’s about chilling out in nice things such as waves and the wind.

Director Bio:
Animation master currently based in Tallinn.
Studied classical piano and later contemporary art, electroacoustic music and animation in Venice and Weimar.
Intern in France as visual content maker for electronic music, and animator and sound designer for poetry animation.

Excerpt of five micro-films that are companions to poems in the book OZARK CROWS (Spuyten-Duyvil Press, 2018).

Director Bio:
My writing, film or visual work has appeared in The New Yorker, Agni, December, Harvard Review, Bomb, Boston Review, Magma, Poetry Film Live, and many other journals. My sixth collection is How Much Of What Falls Will Be Left When It Gets To The Ground? (Tolsun Books, 2018). Among my previous books are Ozark Crows (Spuyten-Duyvil, 2018), Spoke & Dark (Red Hen, 2012), winner of the To The Lighthouse/A Room Of Her Own Prize, and Spine (Parlor Press, 2016).

Director Statement:
Ozark Crows : Twenty Micro Movies
This piece is a companion to a poem in the book of visual poems OZARK CROWS (Spuyten-Duyvil, 2018) about a family of crows in the Ozark Mountains. It contains twenty very short films depicting the creation of the poems along with footage of the crows featured in the book. All the sounds heard on the film are voices, either human or crow, even those of wind and weather. The last segment of the film employs a collective of voices— people with a connection to this particular scrap of land— repeating the final phrase of the book. It is meant to evoke a sense of community, continuity, elegy and memory that not only humans experience.

A video poetry collaboration between poet Erin Lynch and video artist Elizabeth Schiffler.

Credits:
Directed by Elizabeth Schiffler
Written by Erin Lynch

Director Bio:
Born and raised in Newberg, Oregon, Erin Lynch is a poet and artist. Her poems and essays have appeared in journals such as New England Review, Gulf Coast, DIAGRAM, and Hobart, while her performance and video work has been featured at On the Boards, CityArts ArtWalk Awards, 206Q, and elsewhere. She has been the recipient of support from the University of Washington, University of North Texas, The Hugo House, and the Bill & Ruth True Foundation.

Elizabeth Schiffler is an independent scholar and performance artist. Her emerging work with comparative mythology and post-humanism began with her undergraduate work in theatre and cultural studies at the University of Washington. She was the 2018 Artist-in-Residence at Seattle’s Pacific Science Center.

Director Statement:
This piece is a mirroring, literally, of a space of personal reflection. Using the repeated circling of a boat, the vantage point of in-the-water, and the repeated questioning of self, the poet and the filmmaker takes turn turning the images and text through pattern.

A digital poem about the impact of ongoing settler colonialism on Indigenous immigrants.

Director Bio:
fabian romero (Purepécha) is a two-spirit poet, filmmaker, artist and P.h.D. student in Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. fabian’s academic and artistic interests integrate settler colonialism, Performance Studies, racial capitalism with storytelling and poetry. Public Scholarship and Chicana studies also inform their work. Their work centers Purépecha people from Michoacán, Mexico to Seattle, Washington and beyond.

A video poem which uses kinetic text only, no narration, about plastic pollution.

Director Bio:
Fiona Tinwei Lam has authored two poetry books and the forthcoming Odes & Laments (Caitlin Press, 2019). A finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award, she edited The Bright Well: Contemporary Canadian Poems on Facing Cancer and authored the illustrated children’s book about Alzheimer’s, The Rainbow Rocket. Her work appears in over thirty anthologies, including The Best of the Best Canadian Poetry: 10th Anniversary Edition and Forcefield: 77 Women Poets of BC. Her poetry videos have screened at festivals locally and internationally including the Co-Kisser Poetry Film Festival (Minneapolis), Visible Verse (Vancouver), Sadho Poetry Film Festival (Delhi), Athens International Video Poetry Festival, Zebra Festival (Germany), Interfilm Short Film Festival (Berlin), Ani’mest Animation Festival (Budapest), Northwest Animation Festival (Portland), Cadence Video Poetry Festival (Seattle), DOXA documentary film festival (Vancouver), and the Film & Video Poetry Symposium (L.A.). She teaches at Simon Fraser University’s Continuing Studies in Vancouver, BC. fionalam.net

Director Statement:
Each poem asks for a different approach. Text, visual images and sound are woven together in video poetry to create something quite new. Synergies develop when poets and animators collaborate!

Semechki (Семечки) is a series of experimental translations of Eta Dahlia’s minimalist Russian poems into gestural drawings by Iris Colomb.

These translations are entirely process-led. The translator made use of her limited knowledge of Russian, allowing her to experience the poems phonically without semantic bias. Translating the poems’ sounds into gestures became the basis of her systemic approach.

Iris listened to each poem repeatedly for an hour, interpreting each sound as a separate movement tracing a line. Throughout this process her repetitive gestural sequences produced an increasingly intricate network of lines, generating a tightly layered shape. Her movements evolved with each iteration, the drawing itself exposing their range.

The resulting compositions became complex maps of her changing perception, areas and textures displaying different levels of conviction and doubt, making these drawings both translations and documents of performance. By focusing on the materiality of language, and exploring the idea of translation between media, Semechki’s approach takes translation beyond language, with outcomes which strike a balance between the personal and the universal.

This film shows a creation of one of the original drawings from the Semechki collection.

Director Bio:
Eta Dahlia is a Russian poet and filmmaker based in London. His work combines minimalist Russian poetry with a range of other audio-visual media. He works with spoken word, images, colours and music, integrating these elements into inseparable rhythmic and rhyming compositions to create coherent and complete multimedia poetic pieces. One of his goals is to strive to achieve a universal type of a poem, where the understanding and appreciation of the piece is not limited to its original language. Recently, Eta Dahlia’s work has been exhibited at the National Poetry Library at Southbank Centre and the Centre for Recent Drawing.

A piece about profound love for life itself – about how it is worth absolutely everything and nothing at all to claim one’s own voice, dig deep and do the work, get to know oneself and celebrate the holiness of it all. And all along the dance goes on, even after all the singing stops, when there’s the kind of silence inside which one can truly breathe at last.

Director Bio:
Hanna Ojala, 35, is a self-made poet and filmmaker from Finland who has finally found her way of creative expression through video poetry
and is keenly learning more every day. She savors verbalizing actual events in an abstract way as well as describing the visceral effects of inner emotions – making invisible visible and visible indefinite.

Director Statement:

I am an artist who loves to surprise herself by combining elements which when put together create something completely unexpected. I call it “a divine coincidence” when
two or more seemingly separate things complement each other in a way that they form a whole new entity larger and more complex than its parts (usually I recognize this happening by having chills up and down my spine).

Six boys finding their identity, themselves, this is the hardest task.
A film by Helmie Stil based on Dom Bury’s poem The Opened Field.

Director Bio:
I’m a Dutch award-winning filmmaker living and working in the UK. After graduating at the Utrecht School of Arts I’ve been researching, directing and producing my own films since 2006. I love making poetic documentaries and film poems.

My award winning documentaries and film poems have been shown on national television and international film festivals. My film The Desktop Metaphor won the Weimar Poetry Film Award 2018.

I am the director and founder of poetrycinema – films inspired by poetry.

Poetrycinema in association with The Poetry Society commissioned my latest film The Opened Field, which premiered on National Poetry Day 2018 at Southbank London and will be screened and promoted in America as part of Season 9 motionpoems in 2019.

I also organised the Filmpoem Festival 2017 at the independent Depot cinema in Lewes.

www.helmiestil.nl

Director Statement:
When I read the poem my first feeling was to make the film as pure and raw as possible. Everyone has a different feeling when they read a poem, its your own interpretation and I love to let my creativity flow after I’ve read a poem. This poem is for me about finding your identity, rituals, the way children’s feelings/creativity/thoughts can be suppressed by adults, keeping your pureness and connecting to nature. How we forget what’s really important in life.

How to be a mother … who is this being that I am? Wanting to be half-full with the joy of play, a job well done, and the softness of a bed to sink into at the end. Feeling half-empty with a busy brain that won’t shut down and twitches into awakening too early. Feeling overwhelmed by the chores and feeling rubbish as a result because surely that’s really not important. Tossing and turning and struggling to make a zingy start to each new day.

Director Bio:
Born in Rustington, West Sussex. Trained as a typographer by the University of Reading. Jane Glennie practiced for many years as a jobbing freelance designer. Moving towards contemporary art, she took her Masters degree in Art & Space (Distinction) at Kingston University, London. Her work about ambivalent motherhood has been exhibited by ProCreate Project in London in 2017 and in M.A.M.A. issue #23. Her film work has been shown by PoetryFilm at the Hackney Picturehouse, the Groucho Club and Reykjavik, Iceland; in Art Language Location in Cambridge, England; and on Visual Container TV as part of the 29th Festival Les Instants Vidéo, La Friche La Belle De Mai, Marseille, France. She is currently working on a commission, with author and poet Brittani Sonnenberg, for National Poetry Month 2018 for the Visible Poetry Project in the US.

This video-poem projects my own thoughts and feelings musing in voice of my mother to tell parts of her story previously untold. I imagined her writing in a journal while being institutionalized at Chicago-Read Mental Health Center when she was a teenager. Through a collection of episodic journal entries and poetic investigations, the voice of the young artist Amanda Cervantes reenacts the queer, Latina youth of Lourdes Benavides or Lulu, my mother. Rather than embody her they reflect a psychic space and interiority; the private place of reflection and consciousness muted by the institution and the insidious powers of homophobic and patriarchal Western culture.

Credits:
Written and Directed by Jose Luis Benavides
Performance by Amanda Cervantes

Director Bio:
Jose Luis Benavides was born in Chicago, USA 1986. His video art was recently screened at the Museum of Contemporary Art Alfredo Zalce, Morelia, MX; the Bernardo Quintana Art Center, MX; and the Art Museum of Tlaxcala, MX as part of the international festival of video and performance Homography | Homography (2018). He had his first solo show at Terremoto, La Postal, Mexico City (2018). His first feature documentary was an official selection of Collected Voices: ethnographic film festival, Chicago, US (2018); and CinHomo: LGBTQI film festival, Valladolid, Spain (2019). His video work has also exhibited at Qalandiya International, Ramallah, PL (2018); and at the Logan Center for the Arts – Screen Share Gallery, Chicago, US (2018). His videos have been presented on various online media such as Video Video Zine, US (2015); Gothic Angle, UK (2016); and Queer Moving Image Review, US (2018).

The poem short film “23 Lëtzebuerger Jongen“ (“23 Luxembourgish Lads”) adapts the poem of the same name by Luxembourgish writer Wëllem Weis. He dedicated his work to 23 members of the Luxembourgish resistance, who were executed in the Hinzert concentration camp in south-west Germany in 1944.

Director Bio:
Julian Weinert was born on 6 March 1989 in Neunkirchen. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in Media Studies and German Philology at the University of Trier in 2014. In 2017, he finished his master’s studies in Time-based Media at the University of Applied Sciences Mainz, majoring in film directing. He is now working as a Research Assistant in Film Studies and as a freelance filmmaker.

Director Statement:
The video poem “23 Lëtzebuerger Jongen“ is a spin-off from a feature-length documentary I made about the Hinzert concentration camp. It reflects my general interest in poetry and experimental documentaries and illustrates my passion for combining analogue archive footage with digital film.

Sarah Sloat creates visual art that is also poetry. She does this by using various techniques to ‘erase’ most of the words from pages of Stephen King’s novel, Misery. Her ‘erasures’ leave only scattered words around the page, forming small poems. To these, she adds found images, related to the poems in associative ways that recall surrealism. Made in collaboration with Sarah, the Misery video combines a number of the visual poetry pieces and animates them for the screen. This gives rise to a fragmented narrative, or new poem, from the juxtaposition of the selected pieces. The video focuses strongly on the image components of Sarah’s ‘Misery pages’ and creates a new form for them. Rather than a simple presentation of Sarah’s visual poetry, the video is a response to the inspiration of them.

Director Bio:
Marie Craven (Queensland, Australia) assembles short videos from poetry, music, voice, stills and moving images by various artists around the world. Created mostly via the internet, the pieces are collaborative in a way that belongs to the 21st century. Since 2014, Marie has created over 60 videopoems, that have screened at many poetry film festivals and events. She also collaborated for several years as a vocalist with electronic musicians globally, also via the internet. Some of her projects have combined film directing and musical vocalisation in videopoetry. Her earliest involvement in media was in the mid-1980s with super 8 film-making in Melbourne. More at pixie-guts.blogspot.com

Director Statement:
Sarah Sloat creates hand-made visual art pieces that are also poems. She does this by using various techniques to ‘erase’ most of the words from pages of Stephen King’s novel, Misery. Her ‘erasures’ leave only scattered words around the page, forming small poems. To these, she adds found images, related to the poems in associative ways that might recall surrealism. With Sarah’s permission and ongoing feedback, I have here selected a number of the visual poetry pieces and adapted them. The video of Misery constructs a fragmented narrative, or new poem, from the juxtaposition of the selected visual poetry pieces. It focuses strongly on the image components of Sarah’s Misery pages and creates a new form in motion with them. Not a strict ‘presentation’ of Sarah’s visual poetry, the video is my response to their inspiration. Music is by Gurdonark, whose Creative Commons music I have been following for about eight years. Other video collaborations with Sarah Sloat are the award-winning Dictionary Illustrations (O Bheal winner 2016).

A bouncy videopoem coupling real estate and meaning.

Director Bio:
Marie Craven (Queensland, Australia) assembles short videos from poetry, music, voice, stills and moving images by various artists around the world. Created mostly via the internet, the pieces are collaborative in a way that belongs to the 21st century. Since 2014, Marie has created over 60 videopoems. Many of them have screened at poetry film festivals and events around the world. Her earliest involvement in media was in the mid-1980s with super 8 film-making in Melbourne. More at pixie-guts.blogspot.com

Director Statement:
Poem for Rent started life when I discovered the Pushcart-nominated poetry of Canadian writer, Kim Mannix, at the online literary journal, Gnarled Oak. Following a web trail, I then came upon Kim’s blog site where I read Poem for Rent, a short piece coupling real estate and meaning. Kim was agreeable to a film being made from her poem. Around the same time, I rediscovered a vocal-electronic music track called Blink Blink that I’d been part of several years ago with Adrian Carter, who hails from Sheffield, UK. In this track, Adrian cut up my singing voice into very small, percussive units to produce an inventive sound. I contacted Adrian about incorporating this track in a film with the poem. He was happy for me to do that and went further by digging out the old audio files and creating an updated version of the piece especially for this project. The images in the film are fairly randomly sourced stills from Flickr Creative Commons, all of them made available for other artists like me to remix. I edited the stills very quickly to the rhythms of the music, doing some rudimentary animation of them along the way, and interspersed the vision with short snatches of the poem delivered as text-on-screen, like ad lines. Filmmaking is usually time-intensive for me, but this piece came together relatively quickly and in a way that made it feel like it was just waiting to happen.

The Sine Wave is a short film about trying to understand the ups and downs of life through the mathematical function of the sine wave.

Director Bio:
In my work I attempts to translate obscure reality into visual poetry. I explore a combination of traditional animation techniques including ink and paint on paper, cut-out collage, under the camera animation, 2D computer animation and compositing.

An exquisite corpse about the end of the world, made with found 8mm footage.
Words by Daniel DeVaughn. Music by Small Craft.
Directed by Ratigan. Produced by Non Films.

Director Bio:
Brian Ratigan is an award-winning animator and director of stop motion films and experimental work. He serves as Director of Animation for Kumar Pictures, co-founded Atlanta production company Sugartooth Group, and manages Chaotic Cinema. Ratigan is the founder of Non Films and is based in New York City.

Director Statement:
This film is wholly collaborative: the music was created and the words were written without either of them seeing the film images, so it’s more of an “exquisite corpse” or spontaneous film. I’ve always wanted to use this method with a film collaboration, so this seemed like the perfect opportunity to take that risk and create a new or original style of narration through poetic cinema.

This short video poem is dedicated to the fleeting relationships which so often percolate through contemporary life. Song for Hellos and Goodbyes leads viewers through the birth and death of a romantic relationship using the cliché lines of purchased gift cards. Within the script, a second voice emerges to reveal a more authentic picture as the relationship blossoms, sours and disappears.

Credits:
VIDEO, MUSIC & TEXT: written, recorded & edited by Tommy Becker | text compiled from a variety of gift cards. Additional voice – Erin Becker. Performance – Billy Mark.

Director Bio:
Tommy Becker attended the San Francisco Art Institute as an undergraduate before receiving his MFA in Film/Video/Performance from California College of Arts where he was awarded, “The All College Honor Award”. A poet trapped in a camcorder, Becker continues to feed his video, music and poems into his never-ending saga, “TAPE NUMBER ONE”.  He has been an artist in residency at Headlands Center for The Arts and the Wexner Center for the Arts. His work has been shared at Zebra Poetry Film Festival; Bay Area Now 4 at the Yerba Buena Center for The Arts, Black Maria Film Festival; FILE 2017, Sao Paulo, Brazil; Ann Arbor Film Festival; Currents New Media Film Festival & Alchemy Film Festival. His video work has screened nationally and internationally.  Since 2004, he’s worked as an arts educator in the Bay Area.

The protagonist of this film is the reclusive, introspective Ukranian – Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector (1920 – 1977). It is based on a single TV interview broadcast only after her death.

What she says in the 1977 interview is still very pertinent and corresponds to a feeling of ‘in-betweenness’ which I myself feel today.

Director Bio:
American Artist (1945, New York) trained in Brazil and Paris, in the areas of film and psychology. It has a long career as a filmmaker, using analogue formats (especially Super8) and a language close to experimental cinema.

Her works have been displayed in the context of the gallery and she has participated in several exhibitions. Retrospectives were held at the Centre Pompidou and the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro. She has presented works at the MOMA, the Kunsthalle Basel, and the Biennale of São Paulo, as well as festivals like Toronto, London, Berlin, Rotterdam, Clermont-Ferrand, Rio de Janeiro and Viennale. Her films are part of collections as the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris Vidéothèque, MOMA or Freunde der Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin.

Director Statement:
Manhattan, New York was where I happened to be born. After 6 months of stress, I boarded the first plane to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, with my parents and sister. My primary and secondary school was not too far from Ipanema.

My university years were spent in Paris, suffering at a Psychology major (Institut de Psychologie). To make life less tedious, I ended up seeing an inordinate amount of films of all kinds next to the Sorbonne where I occasionally attended classes. After a B.A. in Psychology I majored in Film Studies at the Sorbonne – Paris 3, at the Institut d’Art et Archeologie (Eric Rohmer’s classes) and at the Cinemathèque Française (Henri Langlois’ classes).

In the mid 70s I traveled throughout Europe with a friend, Rosine Grange, in a rundown Renault pick-up van, organizing women’s film festivals and distributing films made by women. Our distribution company was called Cine-Femmes International. My debut as an experimental filmmaker came in 1980, when I co-directed CAROLYN 2 with Martine Rousset (starring choreographer/dancer Carolyn Carlson). It was a film and slide installation. Many films came afterwards, mostly shot in super-8 then blown-up to 16mm. Today I shoot video but still use super-8 whenever possible. Sound has been and is always a vital part of my work.

Installations consisting of multiple projections on different surfaces have been a new adventure. They are always site-specific, ephemeral works that are immersive and in dark spaces. I have presented them in Israel (Tel Aviv and Jerusalem), Portugal (Lisbon) and Austria (Graz) together with my collaborator Ruth Gadish.

Simultaneously my film-related activities have expanded to curating programs for venues such as the Jerusalem Cinematheque. Intersections, a program of Avant-garde films and videos was initiated to introduce the public to cutting-edge works at the Jerusalem Film Festival every year. A competition for video art takes place yearly as well. The OFF Series is a year-round program of video art films shown monthly at the Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem Cinematheques. Other venues I have programmed include the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris and the Escola de Artes Visuais Parque Lage in Rio de Janeiro.

“Home” is wherever I feel at home – and that might be in a hotel or on a plane or on my way to an unknown destination with a camera and recorder in my bag.