Cadence 2021 – Ink of the Unfamiliar Pen [Online]

Screening on demand from April 16–25, 2021

All Cadence 2021 film programs are pay-what-you-can, priced on a sliding scale, $5–25.

Full festival passes are also available for $50, with $35 passes for NWFF members.

* No one turned away for lack of funds; email paul@nwfilmforum.org about free community tickets!

Enter the Cadence 2021 virtual cinema to see more film programs.

About

A marriage can be written into the lattice of a pie topping. Language’s musicality can be hardened into honeycombs. Which of these is not a pen? Ceci n’est pas un pen. The world is full of meaningful inscription. The films in this screening mold meaning using unusual applications of media – string, paint, protest signs – describing poetic abstraction, lyrical free verse, and spoken word with a broad range of novel artistic tools.

Image & showcase title credit: No Words by Mariam Al-Dhubhani & Ahmed Abdul Raqeeb Alkhulaidi


Short Film Program:

Beatings Are in the Body –

Beatings Are in the Body – "No Not This No"

(dir. Melissa Hubert, poetry by Meaghan McAneeley, Canada, 2020, 6 min, in English, with English closed captions)
World premiere!

An artistically abstracted visual representation of an “internal portrait” – situating audiences in the strong and welcome warmth of a body’s interior, diving past all of the politics, judgment, and cruelty this world directs to bodies’ exteriors.

Seven Suns

Seven Suns

(Susan Robb, US, 2021, 2 min, in English, with hardcoded English subtitles)

Seven Suns is a poem about the nearly perfect sphere of hot plasma at the center of our solar system.

For the Ages Film Poetry Project –

For the Ages Film Poetry Project – "Lost Poem"

(dir. Ailene Joven, poetry by JoAnne M. Randall, US, 2020, 5 min, in English, with no subtitles or captions)
US premiere!

For the Ages is a community of Writers, Filmmakers and Scholars that bring generations of older and younger artists together. We seek to explore the diverse voices and stories that connect us.

Can you hear me?

Can you hear me?

(dir. Mana Jahangard, poetry by Forough Farrokhzad, Germany, 2020, 10 min, nonverbal, with hardcoded English text)

Forugh Farrokhzad was an influential Iranian poet, an iconoclast writing the female perspective. Born in Tehran in 1935, she died in a car accident at the age of 32. This video combines several different poems written by her.

No Words (لا كلام)

No Words (لا كلام)

(dir. Mariam Al-Dhubhani, poetry by Ahmed Abdul Raqeeb Alkhulaidi, Yemen, 2020, 5 min, in Arabic, with English subtitles, English, with Arabic subtitles)
US premiere!

No Words is a lyrical film that laments the poet’s loss of words as to what is happening to his beloved city Taiz and the situation in Yemen. It utilizes 360-degree footage to place the audience at the camera’s point of view as an observer to what is occurring in the city.

🏆 Cadence 2021 award-winner! 🏆

Flames that Drift (Laai ende Drift)

Flames that Drift (Laai ende Drift)

(Vito A. Rowlands, Belgium, 2021, 4 min, Dutch intertitles, with no subtitles)
World premiere!

Flames that Drift investigates two icons of New York City, Radio City Music Hall and Rockefeller Plaza, against the backdrop of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, as symbols of naïve interbellum ideas that were laced with futurism and fascism, and built during some of the darkest days of American history, the Great Depression, whose echoes we still feel today.

Who's With Me

Who's With Me

(Darryl Dillard, US, 2017, 5 min, in English, with no subtitles or captions)
Northwest premiere!

A spoken word poetry piece, augmented by visuals and music, that references the police killings in America.

Visual Haiku

Visual Haiku

(Francesco Thérèse, Italy, 2021, 2 min, nonverbal, with English intertitles)
World premiere!

Video art proportioned to the 5+7+5 form of haiku, designed to create pure emotional dialogue with the viewer through the selection of evocative images and sound alterations.

The Abyss Welcomes Us

The Abyss Welcomes Us

(Michèle Saint-Michel, US, 2020, 5 min, in English, with no subtitles or captions)
World premiere!

The Abyss Welcomes Us travels in four dimensions of surrealist Anthropocene and post-4th-wave feminism, all at once.

Legacy

Legacy

(dir. Jack Cochran & Pamela Falkenberg, poetry by Fiona Tinwei Lam, Canada, 2021, 2 min, in English, with English subtitles)
World premiere!

A fanciful, wry, and occasionally bittersweet postmortem of a relationship that founders on the rocks of cross cultural differences.

Bee War

Bee War

(Astra Papachristodoulou, UK, 2020, 6 min, in English, with English subtitles)
US premiere!

Bee War is a poetry film that uses minimalist poetic technique and honey bee imagery to portray the organized chaos and unrest present in our natural world.


Back to Festival Catalog:

Cadence: Video Poetry Festival 2021 Index

Cadence: Video Poetry Festival is an annual series of screenings, workshops, and discussions on the genre of video poetry, held during National Poetry Month. The festival approaches video poetry as a literary genre that is presented as visual media, cultivating new meaning from the combination of text and moving image.

In its fourth year, the 2021 festival features 80 artists from throughout the world. Cadence is the Pacific Northwest’s only festival dedicated to the form of video poetry.

Feature film:

Short film programs:

Live collaborations:


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1515 12th Ave,

Seattle, WA 98122

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