Dear Mahsa

Animation: Martin Pflanzer

Text: Ayeda Alavie

Germany 2022, 5:15 min

In reaction to the murder of 22-year-old Mahsa Jina Amini by the Iranian Guidance Patrol, the film tells about the terrible situation of the people and especially the women in Iran since the Islamic Revolution. The hand-drawn animation illustrates a poem by the author Ayeda Alavie.

 

Click-click, tick-tick

Direction: Martina Pfaff

Text: Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

Germany 2022, 3:04 min

Music video to Ella Milch-Sheriff’s composition “Click-click, tick-tick” for mezzo-soprano and piano after a poem by Sylvia Plath.

Time is running, thoughts are racing, life is running out: is the protagonist in Sylvia Plath’s poem standing still or is she fighting against it? Her loneliness and desperation become palpable, but also the strength with which she runs against it.

With Uta Christina Georg | mezzo-soprano.

For the Skeptical

Direction & Text: Dawn Westlake

USA 2022, 3:14 min

In democracies with freedom of expression, ordinary citizens are granted extraordinary protection. However, in the information sphere, this freedom comes with a very heavy obligation. The press, and the societal leaders they cover, should seek the truth as best they can; not to inflame or entertain, but to illuminate and educate. Sadly, there’s new pressure on information providers to deliver heat instead of shed light because technology and revenue streams are changing so rapidly. But despite the cultural and economic shifts, one thing will always matter: the truth.

Morning Times

Direction: Leang Ren Ong

Text: Dr. Tan Chee Lay

Singapore 2021, 4:15 min

As early as Singapore’s founding years, the news has been part of the culture for the local Chinese community, in particular their morning routine. Ever changing times caught up with the obdurate form of news presentation. The film tributes to the very last day of hardcopy news, an event we are familiar with, in the eyes of the community that has to adapt into the new era.

Wind whisperer

Animation & Text: Fernanda Caicedo

Ecuador 2022, 6:30 min

At the end of the horizon a singing cicada is born. Its flying is short, yet its chanting is eternal.

Soaked In

Animation & Text: Shiyu Tang

China 2022, 4:45 min

At a humid and warm place, I existed.

The whitewashed “gender selection” takes place in two different spaces, where satisfaction and despair mingles.

sentences

Direction & Text: Cia Rinne

Germany 2022, 2:09 min

sentences is based on sentences from the book with the same title by Cia Rinne. In sentences, it is the sentence as a linguistic unit itself that reflects on its purpose and position.

this sentence is looking for the ideal reader 
this sentences is a lifetime sentence 
this sentence wishes it were written by somebody else.

sentences was published as an artist book in an edition of 100 copies by Forlaget Gestus in Copenhagen 2019, and shortlisted for the artist book prize Prix du livre d’artiste Bob Calle in 2021. For the video, the text was slightly adjusted.

When it feels hot, that rage against me

Direction: Helmie Stil

Text: Rebecca Goss

Great Britain 2022, 2:19 min

This poetry film is about the transition from being a girl to a woman from the perspective of a mother who wants to protect her daughter but at the same time wanting to let her go.

Rebecca Goss’ poem ‘When it feels hot, that rage against me’ won the Sylvia Plath Prize in April 2022. For the Sylvia Plath Literary Festival in October 2022 it has been made into a poetry film by Helmie Stil from poetrycinema and The Poetry Society.

Three Cypresses

Animation: Zeynep Sila Demircioğlu

Text: Nâzım Hikmet (1902–1963)

Turkey 2020, 1:23 min

Communist poet and writer Nâzım Hikmet Ran’s poem “Üç Selvi” is about three cypress trees. In his metaphoric narrative, at first, trees live in harmony with nature. After their destruction joy of life is gone and the world is deprived of the sound of cypress leaves. Although Hikmet wrote this mournful poem in 1933, readers can find different meanings and enemies when they look at the dark side of Turkish collective memory.

Winternight

Animation: Charles Badenhorst

Text: Eugene Marais (1871–1936)

South Africa 2023, 4:12 min

In Eugene Marais poem, “Winternag” written in South Africa during the Boer war, he beautifully describes the perfect winter’s morning, conjuring and creating images of a calm day in the veld, the kind of calm you will only find on a winter morning in the African veld. But within this calm is danger and there is sadness, the sadness of a life lost. There is danger in the veld, and war.

 

Fabien, auxiliaire de vie

Direction: Pierre Guiho

Text: Alphonse de Lamartine (1790-1869)

France 2021, 10:00 min

Fabien is a carer in a residence for dependent persons. Among his missions, the young man reads for Mr Verdier, a man who is neither speaking nor walking. One day, while he is reading him poetry, Fabien notices that his auditor’s eyes linger on some parts of his body. Under an impulse, he proposes to take him on a walk…

Tutopique #Spleen

Direction & Text: Maurice Huvelin

France 2021, 2:00 min

TUTOPIQUE is a series of wonderful utopian tutorials and silly little tricks to learn how to imagine a less paradoxical and awfully happier world.

Know

Direction: Ralitza Toneva, Spartak Yordanov

Text: Radoslav Chichev

Bulgaria 2022, 6:00 min

“Know” by the eponymous poem by Radoslav Chichev is part of the video triptych “Other Light”, based on contemporary Bulgarian poetry.

The work explores the associative movements between text, sound and image in words, rhythm, voice, timbre, substance, colour and composition. Light is a building element of the abstract composition, as well as a leading thread in poetry.

The images were created by filming experiments with liquids, pigments, substances and diverse materials.

The blind work (Il lavoro cieco)

Animation: Gianluca Abbate

Text: Lello Voce

Italy 2020, 6:00 min

Starting from a famous slogan of the 1977 political uprisings in Italy “work less, work for everybody ” a long and complex reflection on visual and music poetics on the meaning of work today has unraveled, in a precarious world from rights to privilege from hope of freedom to the certainty of slavery.