Santa Monica Daily Press Santa Monica Daily Press
by Thomas Leffler May 17, 2024
Poetry, film merge to form unique festival atmosphere
Poetry: Local poets and filmmakers joined together in April at Beyond Baroque, Venice, CA, to celebrate the third International Poetry Film Festival.
Two art forms that continue to resonate on the Westside combined this past month in an affair crossing all genres and generations.
In April, Beyond Baroque in Venice hosted the third International Poetry Film Festival Los Angeles, dedicated to bringing poems to life through the visual medium. Ranging from student films to professional productions, various poems were used as scripts for filmmakers, creating their own short-form interpretations of the written works to a rousing reaction from the Beyond Baroque audience.
A panel of judges selected winners in the categories of Best Animation, Best Experimental, Best Narrative and Best Student film, showcasing the international flavor of the festival. Taking the Best Animation crown was France’s Cedric Lyrac for “How to Make a Portrait of a Bird,” while Best Experimental went to Ukraine’s Anastasia Kirii for “My Beloved, Grey-Haired.” The Best Student film was also an international entry, that being Germany’s Florian Schlotzhauer for “The Carousel.” A home victory for the United States did come in the Best Narrative category, with Lourdes Figueroa and Peggy Peralta winning for “Las Marimacha Fragments.”
Festival Founding Director Lynn Holley said that when entries start coming in from all over the world, “that’s when you know you have a film festival.” Holley added that some films were based on classic poems, while others took extracted ideals from poems as the basis for a movie. The mix of filmmaking ability and poem interpretation made picking victors a pickle for Holley and other judges.
“Having done other film festivals, and having judged some very big film festivals in the nation, (poetry film) becomes actually more complicated than most other disciplines of filmmaking or poetry writing,” Holley said. “It’s a challenge sometimes, (sometimes) the poem is great (but) the film’s not so great, (or the) poem is weak but we love the film … looking at entries, (we try) to find that good middle ground, and that’s difficult.”
A veteran of the film festival ecosystem, Holley decided to start the poetry-focused festivities in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, originally slating it for online-only before finding Beyond Baroque as a partner venue. Working through the Film Freeway platform to select films each year, Holley wanted a focus on relation to “the environment around” where the film is screened, but eventually made room for a host of international entries.
Selecting just over 30 of the 100 submitted films in 2024, Holley feels like the right films were plucked for the competition, including the personal favorite category of animation. “I think it’s the kid in all of us … there’s something about (animation) that we are all connected, ” she said.
Interview with Director Lynn M. Holley, in "Common Reader."
Common Reader December 2021
New Poetry-Film Festival Underway
by John Griswold
I had never registered that there are film festivals dedicated to poetry and filmmaking until a friend told me recently about a new one, called the International Poetry Film Festival. International Poetry Film Festival judges are currently considering 41 short films, from several countries, in categories such as Narrative, Animated, Documentary, and Experimental.
The common thread is that all entries must be “poem based” and under 30 minutes. The Festival is open for submissions until February 28, 2022, but there is a “late deadline” three weeks after that. Entries can be submitted here at Film Freeway. Founding Director Lynn Moss Holley stresses to me on on the phone that poetry is the spine of these films.
“The poem can exist without the film,” she says, “but the film can’t exist without the spine of the poem.” But films for the Festival do not have to include entire poems or use poems as scripts; they can also be documentaries about poets or poetic forms, or they can experiment with images and soundtracks inspired by poetry.
Examples on the Festival site include an “homage to haiku”; an ekphrastic video about sculptures in Liverpool; and Auden’s “Night Mail” used in a documentary short of the same name. Films chosen for the Festival will be co-curated by, and screened at, Beyond Baroque, a public space for the literary arts in Venice, California, which has deep ties to the Los Angeles poetry community and to independent artists across the country.
In-person events will also include a day of panel discussions. Prizes include Best Film (possibly in different categories), Finalists, and Honorable Mentions, as well as an Audience Favorite Award and a Festival Director’s Choice Award. “In case judges don’t pick the one I like best,” Holley says, laughing. After the Festival ends, selections will be made available online for a nominal fee, she says.
Holley has been an active curator and art consultant for more than 15 years and has served as executive director of a large arts center in Florida and resident curator of two major art and science centers in California. Her graduate degree is in Museum Studies from the University of Leicester. She has also worked as a writer, journalist, and promotional filmmaker. The 3 Minute Film Festival that she founded is in its 10th season, and her International Fine Arts Film Festival is in its fifth. She tells me they were getting enough poem-based entries that she thought those filmmakers should have their own festival. Holley generally would like to see more Americans engage with poetry on a regular basis, and she feels that partnering with Beyond Baroque, whose model is what she calls “an exploration of the possibilities of language,” will help with that. The organization holds 150 literary readings, musical performances, and other events each year. Tom Waits, Wanda Coleman, Amy Gerstler, and Amanda Gorman have attended poetry workshops; Dana Gioia, Patti Smith, and Michael McClure have read or performed.
“Amanda Gorman got her legs at Beyond Baroque,” Holley says, “and you realize how empowering poetry is.” In judging the Festival, Holley and her colleagues will “look at the whole elephant of film and poem. “It is a very difficult balance this first year,” she admits. But, for her, “Poetry…cuts to the core of the emotion of a story, and the spine of the film must be the poetry, whatever else it’s about.”
