Happy New Year and a new column – On The Cutting Edge by Marc Zegans
On The Cutting Edge : Marc Zegans Looks at New Work
Launching into 2025 I am thrilled to be able to announce that leading American poet and poetry filmmaker Marc Zegans (based out of Pacific Grove, Northern California) will be writing a regular column – On the Cutting Edge – on selected poetry books and films for Liberated Words. I can’t tell you how I have been looking forward to this, since I have admired Marc’s writing for some time now, and feel he will introduce a whole new tranche of writers into the fold.
For his first Cutting Edge deep dive he is writing an overview in brief on The Zombie Family Takes a Selfie by Ed McManis – Bottlecap Press, 2024. See: Cutting Edge 1 The Zombie Family Takes a Selfie by Ed McManis
Many of you may be familiar with his work and the essay I wrote (here on LW) on his evocative and palpable poetry collection / memoir of San Francisco – Lyon Street, published by Bamboo Dart Press. I was also really fortunate to recite from my forthcoming Tree publication and present on poetry film with him in San Francisco last year; and, with a well-trodden groove, feel no one could be a finer example of setting loose the melodies and cracks in the American voice.
He has published an impressive body of work – seven poetry collections to date: Lyon Street (Bamboo Dart Press, 2022), The Snow Dead (Cervena Barva Press, 2020), and La Commedia Sotterranea Della Macchina da Scrivere (Pelekinesis, 2019) being the most recent. He has also made spoken word albums; several immersive theatrical productions, including Sirens, Dreams and a Cat (co-written with D. Lowell Wilder, 2020), and many poetry films. Ghost Book (Kite String Press, 2024), a collaboration with fine art photographer Tsar Fedorsky, was released in April of this year. Marc’s work can also be found in a variety of anthologies including, Kerouac on Record, A Literary Soundtrack, edited by Simon Warner and Jim Sampas.
Marc lives near the coast in Northern California, where he can be found on the bluffs most evenings enjoying the gorgeous sunsets.
FURTHER DETAILS
Marc Zegans is a poet, spoken word artist, and creative development advisor who helps artists, writers and creative people thrive and shine, see: mycreativedevelopment.com
In addition to his broader creative advisory practice, Marc consults with emerging poets on the development of their craft. He writes periodically about creativity and innovation, and politics.
He is on Instagram @marczegans. He is listed as zegansmarc
He is also on LinkedIn and Facebook
Just to round things off, here is a recent review of Lyon Street by Richard Modiano, if you aren’t familiar with Marc’s work.
Marc Zegans’ Lyon Street is a unique contribution to the literature of the flâneur, that passionate wanderer keenly aware of the bustle of modern life, an amateur detective and investigator of the city. Zegans’ examinations of the conditions of urban life, joy, memory, alienation, class tensions, are not those of a solitary, dissociated urban observer. Instead Zegans turns flânerie into testimony, and he brings the city of San Francisco to life in a Proustian memory palace of pleasure and regret.
—Richard Modiano, Director Emeritus Beyond Baroque Foundation
Poetics of Resistance – POSVERSO biennial – videopoetry curation by Alejandro Thornton
The formidable Argentinian-based POSVERSO BIENNIAL presents a rich selection of poets from the digital media / literary / electronic / visual poetry world in a multitude of events and locations. It is perhaps the most historic event of its kind today. By that I mean it centres not only on different types of avant-garde poetry (digital, visual, performative etc), but also expands on the potential of poetry and how artists can confront political turmoil and abuse. How political statement can be visualised through words and images. If you picked one event to find the very best, the most explosive of this particular mix, it would be in Argentina at this time in world history.
As the curatorial statement by Silvio De Gracia for the First Biennial, states:
‘Experimental poetry is not an aseptic or alienated language, but a language that, as the Mexican poet César Espinosa stated, is made of “corrosive signs.” In the case of Latin America, starting in the 1970s, the practice of experimental poetry took on an eminently political character, which not only aimed at the creation of new forms of reading and writing, but also at the diversion and subversion of the normalized discourses of dictatorial contexts. Here are included the proposals of historical poets such as Clemente Padín, Edgardo Antonio Vigo or Guillermo Deisler, but also of other creators who, without registering within the specific field of experimental poetry, develop practices in which they seek to renew artistic repertoires, to the time to transform or challenge social and political conditions.
POSVERSO takes up this tradition of an experimental poetic current, which is connected to scenarios of confrontation and resistance, and which is oriented towards the construction of other meanings, other narratives, other ways of inhabiting the world. For POSVERSO, experimental poetry is an inexhaustible field in which games with words and various writing signs are exceeded, to drift towards forms of intersemiotic translation, in which verbal signs are transmuted or transferred to non-verbal signs, or from one system of signs to another; for example, from verbal writing to music, dance, painting, video. This intersemiotic character is what links experimental poetry with the approaches of the conceptualist movement, especially with the proposal of the Fluxus Art intermedias developed by Dick Higgins. Poetry is everything. Hybridizations, crossings, translations configure the productive matrix of a series of poetic processes, whose realizations can be found not only in the field of experimental poetry, but within the expanded horizons of the visual arts, music, performance, video.’
The main exhibition Poetics of Resistance “Poéticas de la resistencia”curated by Silvio De Gracia and designed by Ana Montenegro opened at MACA Museum of Contemporary Argentine Art on October 18th in Junin. Primarily showcasing practitioners from Latino backgrounds such as Javier Robledo, Clemente Padin, Joyce Ribeiro and Alejandro Thornton, many Spanish (such as Bartolomé Ferrando) and European artists (Jaap Blonk, Montenegro Fisher) are also featured.
[Incidentally the term Poetics of Resistance was also made famous by Argentine artist and human rights activist Marcelo Brodsky. As a poetics of political intervention he redefines journalistic images of political events through his art.]
Through presenting at VideoBardo 2012, I have met some of the leading Argentinian media poets such as Claudia Kozak (showing with Rodolfo Mata (México) and Michael Hurtado (Perú) in an electronic poetry event on the 29th November. And, Javier Robledo presented a VideoBardo screening in the Poetics of Resistance event, which I am pleased to see.
Just a few of the locations at POSVERSO.
With more than a hundred activities: workshops, conferences, exhibitions, pre-events, (and including projects worldwide such as on mail art to those in public spaces, with titles such as ‘Resisting the Present’ and Marginalia – Notes, visions and writings on the edges) this is an impressive cultural event with a strong selection of artists. You can see how much planning has gone into this biennial by checking out the different locations on offer.
The whole biennial closes Friday the 20th December at the Hotel DADA (with a concert online) and with seven more events to come there is still a lot to see. For example, Paulo Bruscky (b: 1949) the Brazilian multidisciplinary artist whose pioneered mail art in the 1960s. Influenced by avant-garde artists such as Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, and later connected to Fluxus in the 1970s, it mustn’t be forgotten that mail art could circumvent the authorities in terms of expressing political freedom during Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964–1985). Bruscky (1976)“In Mail Art, art has reclaimed its principal functions: information, protest, and denunciation.”
Latin America (back) Paulo Bruscky, 1976.
Centro de Capacitación y Cultura ATSA, Junin.
Videopoetry
There will also be a videopoetry event at the Centro de Capacitación y Cultura ATSA, Junín curated by Alejandro Thornton, who some of you may know is one of the artists featured in the poetry anthology / screening publication Frame to Frames : Your Eyes Follow from Poem Film Editions. His aim behind the screening is to bring videopoetry to the streets.
SOS, Augusto de Campos, 2000.
Artists include: ‘Oskar Fischinger (Alemania), Walter Ruttmann (Alemania), Augusto de Campos (Brasil), Decio Pignatari (Brasil), Tom Konyves (Canadá), Montenegro-Fischer (UK-Chile), Sarah Tremlett (UK), Tulio Restrepo (Colombia), Tatiana Gaviola (Chile), Belén Gache, Gonzalo Aguilar (author of leading publication on Argentinian Cinema), Ivana Vollaro, Rubén Grau, Ro Barragán, Rosa Gravino, Paula Pellejero, Facundo Díaz and Alejandro Thornton amongst others’.
Organic Fragments – White, Paula Pellejero, 2024.
Really a very exciting collection of works, and I wish I could be there to see a rare example of Walter Ruttmann’s abstract cinematic film – Lichtspiel Opus I (1921). I am honoured that my poetry film Solstice Sol Invictus has been included in this really impressive group and particularly with the legendary artist Augusto de Campos. I have added below a still from SOS (2000) a video with rotating texts and repeating vocalising; also of course reminiscent of Duchamp’s Anemic Cinema. I should add that it hasn’t yet been revealed to me which are the exact films being screened, so this may not be in the final show.
In Solstice Sol Invictus I created the concept (words, visuals, sound) of the film for Lucy English’s The Book of Hours project, with the theme of course registering the mediaeval and reflective, temporal feel of the original Books of Hours, but with the sun and its passage through the year as a central theme. I came up with the (verbal, visual and sound) concept and wrote the first four verses and Lucy the second.
Solstice Sol Invictus, Sarah Tremlett (concept and poet, and Lucy English poet), 2018.
I also made another poetry film for this project (a natural pair) entitled Summer Solstice (with old 35 mm footage of a California beach). Solstice Sol Invictus effectively uses the screen as a moving canvas, showing the changes in light as the sun passes through the seasons, reflecting on light, hope, faith and solar time. I also have referenced earlier painters and their solar depictions and in the latest version I have included these at the end. I was influenced by: Max Ernst’s Black Sun 1927–8; Vincent Van Gogh’s Sower with Setting Sun, 1888; Ambassador of Autumn, 1922 by Paul Klee, which has haunted me with its tonal, horizontal gradations, also influencing the dynamic structure of Mr Sky (2018), (another poetry film with Lucy English) and a later abstract landscape Spiral Motif in Green, Violet, Blue and Gold: The Coast of the Inland Sea (1950) by British artist Victor Pasmore, 1908–98.
Black Sun, Max Ernst, 1927.
FOR A COMPLETE OVERVIEW GO TO:
https://posversobienal.com.ar/
FOTOGENIA 6 – Nine Glorious Days of Wonder, Talent and Imagination in Mexico City
FOTOGENIA INTERNATIONAL FILM POETRY & DIVERGENT NARRATIVES FESTIVAL, based out of Mexico City must now be the largest festival of its kind in the world. I was so fortunate to be able to go last year and this year Festival Director Chris Patch has excelled himself. From November 21st to the 30th every day is full of themed screenings, live and online, and where uniquely some films are very short and others up to twenty minutes. With curations creatively titled such as Fugaz – ‘Fleeting’, transient, ephemeral; Sacudida – ‘Shock’, shake, jolt, tremor; Asfixia – Asphyxia; Destierro ‘Exile’, Banishment, Uprooting (see Lebanese filmmaker Josef Khallouf’s Exiles, online), there are now 15 sections and many other screenings and performances.
As there are so many films this year and it has been impossible to narrow these down, I am going to focus mainly on a selection of performative films. Many of these are made in relation to an overwhelming fear or predicament; a suffering experienced or engendered by mankind. There are many approaches, such as the film Unseen by Helmie Stil and Sjaan Flikweert, where the underwater camera is close up on the face of a distressed woman, submerged under both real and metaphoric waves.
Unseen, Helmie Stil and Sjaan Flikweert
In Somber Tides Canadian director and choreographer Chantal Caron has created a startling elegiac environmentally aware work of art in film. Performing in remote locations, and filmed from above, dark fabrics billow out from the dancers over (disappearing) snow-covered landscapes. Amongst blizzard conditions the evocative movements suggest a lament for the loss of habitat and effectively the birds of the region. The message is profound and clear.
Somber Tides, Chantal Caron
Are You Crying is also dance-based, and sensitively and evocatively told by American multidisciplinary artist Marissa Brown. Wearing a glittery dress, she is positioned by a late-night empty road, where occasional cars pass. Her movements suggest a form of capture and release, of uncertainty, and lack of belonging. ‘It’s a desire to make beauty out of a time of grief, processing, and growth.’
Are You Crying, Marissa Brown
Observer, by Serbian videopoet Ana Pantic chillingly encapsulates the feeling of being a helpess watcher of how the world is imploding, as it is beset by war and planetary destruction. Beginning with the line ‘Maybe these are the last days’ we see a woman’s naked back with hair cascading down, as an overlay of a tank seems to pass over her. The very stillness of the body combined with the graphic images reinforces the larger picture. ‘In the Beginning was the Word … and the Word was with God’ as if we are in the hands of fate and a God that must now come to help us against the evil in the world.
Observer, Ana Pantic
Two short films I would also like to mention are Over Her Head (Sobre su Cabeza) by talented Mexican cinematographer and director Fernando Mol where a girl climbs to the roof to escape her problems: ‘In the Total Darkness Poetry is Still There’, and What Do You Do With Everything You Feel (Qué Haces Con Todo Aquello que Sientes?) by innovative Mexican director Ale Nuño, which cleverly disseminates the tensions and desires around making a telephone call.
Over Her Head, Fernando Mol
What Do You Do With Everything You Feel, Ale Nuño
With man bonded to his computer, Life Machine by Australian artist, poet and filmmaker Mark Niehus reminds us that humans are now inseparable from our machines. We trust and share our space with these objects that also guide and form us, in an endless vortex of searching and finding. You might ask, ultimately, do we need a ‘real’ human in this performance?
Life Machine, Mark Niehus
Equally, Martin Gerigk’s Demi-Demons postulates a strange hybrid world that is ersatz reality – a sort of AI surrealist dream from animated vintage photos and in collage form. It is described as an ‘essay film about the contradictions of contemporary existence, which separate us from our natural instincts, opening abysses within us’. Like Life Machine it also opens up questions about where we situate ourselves in our real v. audiovisual, streaming existence. Perhaps we function 50% online, where our thought processes and methods of understanding are well attuned to navigating these always enticing waters. Here, storytelling images can be outrageous and startling, and therefore memorable with creative permeability. Gerigk not only directs audiovisual art and experimental films but is also a professional contemporary music composer. As such his work is strongly focused on the ‘inherent synesthetic connections of sound and visual perceptions’.
Demi-Demons, Martin Gerigk
There are also full-length screenings such as: Vita Altra (Otra Vida) Another Life by Italian director Davide Belotti and project-based films such as Explosives by Paula Alves and Coraline Claude. Another Life is a fascinating experimental feature that is uniquely experimental in its geographic locations and filming approach. Taking 16 months to make, between Italy, Belgium, Lanzarote and Sicily, over 170 actors and members of the public took part. Whilst it appears like a random sequence of scenes that have to be decoded, to quote the website: ‘A Sicilian man confronts his past as two strangers embody his conflicting desires, blending fantasy and reality’.
In Programme 8 Fortalezas – (‘Strengths’ or strongholds, fortresses, citadels) Paula Alves and Coraline Claude have created the feminist project Explosives. Alves is a multimedia artist, performer, filmmaker and art therapist who investigates the relationship between the unconscious and its forms of somatization in the body. Claude is an actress and director who often uses poetry in her research. Under her, nine women studied the poetry anthology “Je transporte des explosifs. On les appelle des mots” with feminist poems by: Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Gloria Anzaldúa & Cherríe Moraga, bell hooks, Dorothy Allison, Robin Morgan, Marge Piercy, Alice Walker, Paula Gunn Allen, Rita Mae Brown and more. Each woman on the project reinterpreted a poem which became the film Explosives.
Explosives, Paula Alves and Coraline Claude
There will also be a selection of online Zoom discussions for participants. I am looking forward to taking part on Saturday November 23rd. I would also like to add that I am honoured that Programme 2 – Sacudida (Shock, jolt, tremor) includes my own latest film Vuelo / Flight. It is an autobiographical poem and film about my mother who suffered depression, and my role as cleaner and gardener from the age of five. It is the prologue to my upcoming poetry collection The Unexhibited.
Flight / Vuelo, Sarah Tremlett
Please do take the trip to Mexico. You have to experience FOTOGENIA at least once in your lifetime!!!
Please go to the side bar on the Home Page for the link to the festival.
OBHÉAL – HYBRID WINTER WARMER, CORK and live online – a rich feast
OBHÉAL hybrid WINTER WARMER festival, CORK 22-24th November and online
Ó Bhéal (Irish for ‘by word of mouth’, or ‘from the mouth’) is here again with its 12th Winter Warmer festival. Ó Bhéal is true to its name, in that poetry film cohabits so snugly with a very full schedule of poetry in many other forms such as experimental theatre, reading to music, spoken word etc. And by extension, this is also its 4th hybrid edition, being live online as well.
My poetry film Mr Sky with poem by Lucy English was selected in 2019 when Fiona Aryan deservedly won, and it was a great occasion, both in the poetry films shown but also visiting Cork itself, and Cork Indie Film Festival was also in full swing providing a lively hub.
Founder and Director Paul Casey has to be applauded for hosting poetry events continuously since April 2007. At first once a week until December 2019, then once a month, he has been tireless in promoting poetry not only in the Cork community but with joint ventures further afield such as the Twin Cities project (Cork-Coventry). The first poetry film festival was held in November 2010. Ó Bhéal really feels like it has evolved naturally, with a strong committee team and more recently leading Irish poetry filmmaker Colm Scully to provide poetry film workshops. Not only is there a sense of a percolation that is continually bubbling up between poetry and film through all the seasons, but at each Winter Warmer the winner of the international poetry film competition receives a beautiful, unique award by glass artist Michael Ray. What more could you ask for?
For 2024 over 50 poets from seven countries will be performing, with some live online, and Ó Bhéal is mindful of its own heritage, presenting ‘bilingual readings, showcasing the best of today’s gaelic-speaking poets’.
The programme gives you a feeling of the varied riches on offer: ‘The festival includes a haiku workshop with Anton Floyd, a poetry-film workshop with Colm Scully, the launch of Southword issue 47, two music/poetry fusions from Séamus Barra Ó Súilleabháin, an experimental theatre performance from Strive Theatre and MacBóchra, an Open-Mic Showcase featuring fifteen poets from five Cork-based regular open-mic events, plus a Closed-Mic set, for ten poets from Ó Bhéal’s regular open-mic sessions during 2024.
The shortlist and prize-giving for Ó Bhéal’s 12th International Poetry-Film Competition will be screened and simulcast, as will an additional, special selection of poetry-films made in Ireland.’
I would recommend visiting Cork for this very special festival. There will be two screenings on the morning of Sunday 24th November 11.00am-12.00pm and 12.30pm-1.30pm at Nano Nagle Place, Cork & streamed via the festival website festival stage and Facebook & YouTube channels.
Three examples of political poetry films include: Pamela Falkenberg and Jack Cochran with the film Migrations from the poem of the same name by Robin Davidson. Their use of animation excels with this subject which reminds us, and particularly with the dark election results, that everyone in America is an immigrant other than the indigenous peoples.
And, unfortunately so very topical, with the flash floods in South Eastern Spain recently, Australian poet and filmmaker Ian Gibbins’ Types of Rain reminds us of the horrific effects of Climate Change that are happening as we speak. As he says ‘How do we understand a future when we have failed to comprehend the past?’
I was one of the jurors at Weimar Poetry Film Festival this year, and another political film that I voted as winner of that festival was Berkovich by German director Anya Ryzhkova. This is a chilling true account of being imprisoned ‘detained’ in Russia for your creative output.
Amnesty International states: ‘Theatre director Evgenia Berkovich and playwright Svetlana Petriychuk are being arbitrarily detained since 5 May and face prosecution for authoring and staging “Finist Yasny Sokol,” an award-winning play about women who left for Syria and married members of armed groups. Both women face absurd charges of “justifying terrorism” which carry up to seven years in prison. Russian authorities must immediately release them and drop all charges.’
‘The film is based on a speech by the Russian theater director Evgenia Berkovich. Together with the playwright Svetlana Petriychuk, Evgenia Berkovich has been under arrest and jailed since May 2023 on charges of “public calls to terrorism”. On the ninth of January 2024, before the verdict was supposed to be announced, she read her final speech in verse.’
On another note, dance also features in the finalists this year with Butterfly, from the poem Butterfly by Marco Sonzogni, which is described as a poetic dance film about art, beauty and death. It is directed by Alfio Leotta (New Zealand), the founder and director of the Aotearoa Poetry Film Festival in New Zealand.
It is also good to see work by long-established Galician filmmaker and poet Celia Parra – Un rastro de luz (A trace of light) – which contemplates spirituality and mortality, through the Goddess Navia in the flow of the river. Celia was executive producer of the Videopoetry documentary Versogramas / Verses and Frames (Belen Montero and Juan Lesta, 2018).
A personal favourite of mine is this film by Canadian Kim Traitor Hwlhits’um | Signs which ‘describes a boat trip from Canoe Pass to Lamalchi Bay on Penelakut Island off the west coast of British Columbia, during which Hwlitsum knowledge holder Lindsey Wilson traced the traditional path of Hwlitsum First Nation on their yearly hunting and gathering rounds, and shared his memories of his time on the Salish Sea. This poetry film is part of the installation “walk quietly: ts’ekw’unshun kws qututhun (walk quietly with respect and care along the shore),” a guided artist-scientist walk along Hwlhits’um (Brunswick Point/Canoe Pass) in collaboration with Hwlitsum First Nation. www.walkquietly.ca
And finally, my own film Flight, which is a very personal poem and poetry film about my childhood relationship with my mother, who suffered depression, though I didn’t know it at the time. We rattled around in a large, cold house – my father’s dream, bought at auction – but there were parts she never visited in her entire life. I cleaned and looked after the house and garden to help her, from the age of five. The visual imagery also includes samples of my neo-expressionist paintings and ‘Floor’ carpet, floor and dust sculpture from the 1980s. The poem is also inspired by an ekphrastic poem I wrote about Lanyon’s work ‘The Last Green Mile’ (Transitional : Otter Gallery Anthology, Chichester University, 2015). ‘Flight’ is from the forthcoming commissioned collection – Unexhibited, available in 2025.
https://www.obheal.ie/blog/competition-poetry-film/poetry-film-shortlist-2024/
https://www.obheal.ie/WinterWarmer/PoetryFestival2024.htm
Avant-Garde Maldito Video Poetry Festival – Albacete, Spain –
Maldito (11–17 November) began in 2017 and it has really come of age this year with a comprehensive curation of creative films from around the world and its online presence via FILMIN. What makes it unique is the approach by Javier Garcia, festival director and his team. You can enjoy a party vibe with avant-garde events, electronic music and poetry ‘that is danced’, videopoetry of course, but also seminal international poetic cinema. Maldito not only looks for new ideas and approaches but also creates a hub for such events, and has become a major festival on the poetry film circuit with a strong curatorial eye.
This year Maldito is asking all the questions that I am fascinated by, and have discussed in the publication The Poetics of Poetry Film (Intellect Books, 2021), such as ‘How does video poetry differ from experimental cinema etc. etc.’ On Wednesday 13th there will be a really interesting round table discussion at the Municipal Museum in Albacete to ‘determine what this new discipline is exactly. Those taking part are Isaías Griñolo (video creator), Clara López Cantos (video poet and film director) and Samkale (video poet) with David Trashumante (poet) as moderator.
For me, another really important examination of the subject is a workshop for EAA students by David Trashumante, who ‘runs a three-year Seminar ¿Nuevas Prácticas Poéticas? which he coordinated for the University of Valencia. This introduces and defines subgenres of postmodern poetry such as videopoetry, cyberpoetry, polypoetry, postpoetry, performance poetry, stage poetry…’ Here he encourages poetic experimentation, and an introduction to contemporary avant-garde poetry. I wish that this had been available ten years ago!!!
There will be also be a videopoetry retrospective screening the best works from the annual competition, held at the Teatro Circo de Albacete which I will not miss. A really good innovation on the part of the organisers. The poetic cinema includes historical documentaries, for example, Miles in Bello. Juan Bernier in the Spanish War – a documentary with direction by Rafael Bernier and Juan Antonio Bernier; and Carlos Edmundo de Ory. The game and the word, a documentary about the Andalusian ‘iconoclastic poet’ from Cadiz directed by Jose Luis Hernandez Arango.
The videopoetry competition will happen at the Circus Theatre, Albacete, on Friday 15th, with yet another highly talented and creatively innovative group of finalists. My film Selfie with Marilyn with poem by leading American poet Heidi Seaborn won in 2021 so I am particularly keen to see this screening. I was also invited to be one of the jurors for the winning film so I have had a wonderful but difficult time over the last few days, narrowing down contenders. Films can be seen such as Croatian team (director) Arinovic and poet Anaïssa Ali with the film Unbreakable and cameraless cinema; or poetic reciting to a drone, from the balcony of a building with direction by Sofia Lenski and Adrian Guterman and poetry by Juan Pablo Di Lenarda. A number reflect on climate change, and the interconnection between humans and the environment, and our reaction to the uncertainty of the future, such as Eyrie with poem and film by Eni Derhemi.
The politics of living in the turmoil of the world today can be found in Confessions an examination of what ‘homeland’ means by Andisheh Bagherzadeh (Tehran, 1993) a film reflecting ‘lost memories’ of life in Iran. Also a warning on navigating the role of women in relation to men in the French film Letter to my daughter with direction by Michael Maurissens and poetry by Amee Slam; or Mont Carver’s Mutations, a filmic account of her response to her father’s near-death experience whilst away from home without health insurance.
A number of films reflecting on a fractured, transient or blurred sense of identity and place such as the Spanish film One sky. All the skies with poem and film by Samkale, or British poet and filmmaker Laurie Huggett’s All I Loved which is inspired by ‘childhood wanderings through graveyards and one particular grave. With my co-juror and festival organiser, Linda Cleary, I also included this evocative film in the Women in Word festival in Penzance last summer.
One Sky. All the Skies
And then again we can discover the extraordinary from the everyday, as in the unmissable Spanish film A fish is a fish is a fish directed by Alberto Pombo with poem by Marilar Aleixandre. I will just quote the synopsis directly: ‘A portrait of Fisterra and of the entire Galician sea world, captured on the Costa da Morte. These are the hands and eyes of Alexandre Nerium, poet and sailor, the nets his father carried and the ‘clean’ ones where the rapante hides. A rose is a rose is a rose and therefore, a fish is a fish is a fish. Seafaring erudition, wild toponymy, love songs and saltpeter. Sardines are suspicious.’
https://malditofestival.com/seleccion-oficial-viii-concurso-internacional-de-videopoesia-2024
POSTPONEMENT DUE TO FLASH FLOODS
I am very saddened to add I was invited to present a retrospective of my own work at Maldito this year along with Frame to Frames : Your Eyes Follow – the bilingual, ekphrastic poetry anthology with linked films. Unfortunately I felt this had to be cancelled due to the horrific flash floods in South East Spain. I would add this was my personal decision, also based upon an upcoming operation. Maldito will be an amazing event, better than ever before. My retrospective will happen in two years at their major Ten Year celebration.
AOTEAROA POETRY FILM FESTIVAL, New Zealand, 20–21 November
Establishing a stand-alone, annual festival in what is really a niche genre is a real achievement. It takes courage, creativity and also, sticking power. I know the experience – the feeling of finishing one and immediately thinking about the next. Aotearoa is now in its second year but already well established, and is one of those poetry film events that you really wish you could attend. This is partly because New Zealand seems to not only have a really creative approach to film and poetry, but also how to celebrate it, rather than focus on the competitive element. They encourage the innovative and eclectic, and this year it is organised in collaboration with Victoria University of Wellington. As they say on the website:
‘The Aotearoa Poetry Film Festival is an event entirely devoted to the celebration and showcase of poetry film. The Festival will feature a poetry film competition, workshops, seminars, poetry readings and retrospectives and it will offer the opportunity to showcase the diversity of poetry film produced both in Aotearoa New Zealand and overseas.’ https://www.aotearoapff.com/
I really like this balance between screenings and other options, particular poetry readings and retrospectives. The background to the festival inspires me. Firstly, festival founder and co-director Alfio Leotta is an award-winning filmmaker who has written a number of of books on film. His Canadian co-director Tyler Shane Tesolin (completing a research PhD in film at Victoria University) ‘has been making movies his entire life, focusing primarily on the intersection between poetry and film’ and has written two books of poetry. These backgrounds are important to me – where those involved either write poetry or make films (ideally both). I am always interested in the creative trajectories of the organisers and judges, as well.
The jurors this year are equally as talented and impressive. Nova Paul (Ngāpuhi) is a filmmaker, writer, and Indigenous rights researcher. Her creative practice explores experimental film history and Indigenous filmmaking. She lectured for over two decades at AUT and established the Cinematic Arts minor. She has exhibited in all major galleries in New Zealand and shown in many international film festivals, including the Rotterdam International Film Festival and Sundance Film Festival
Missy Molloy is a senior lecturer in film at Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington in Aotearoa New Zealand, where she lectures on women’s, queer, posthuman and activist cinemas. She is co-author of Screening the Posthuman (Oxford University Press 2023) and co-editor of ReFocus: The Films of Susanne Bier (Edinburgh University Press 2018). Her recent publications include the video essay, “Art Cinema’s Suicidal Posthuman Women” ([in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies 2024), and “Indigenous Futurist and Women-Centred Dystopian Film” (Feminist Posthumanism and Postfeminist Humanism, Bloomsbury 2023)
Dafydd Sills-Jones is an Associate Professor at Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand. He is from Aberystwyth in West Wales. His films are concerned with places, identity, and language.
I should also add that my poem and film Flight has been included this year, so I feel very honoured to be able to share that news. As it was a much more personal poem and film about my childhood I am really touched that it is being shown. The poem is from a commissioned forthcoming collection Unexibited, in 2025.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfbA3rlFOtg&t=1s
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