Filmpoem Festival 2014 was held on Saturday 14th June 2014 in the FelixPakhuis in Antwerp as part of Felix Poetry Festival. Filmpoem Festival is fully supported by Antwerpen Boekenstad and is working in partnership with The Poetry Society.
What a festival we had! The Huffington Post did us a super write-up, enjoy it here in full:
“Poets, musicians and filmmakers from all over the world converged on a converted packing house in Antwerp, Belgium last Saturday for a day of gorging on film-poems. It was glorious.
While last year in Dunbar, Scotland had an element of novelty on its side, this year was carefully structured to up the ante. A group of Dutch and Flemish film-poem artists presented their work, along with the debut screening of the UK National Poetry Competition film-poems, Absent Voices films, conversations with poets in response film-poems of their work that they had just seen, and even live performances of voice and music in accompaniment to film. The scope, variety, and innovation was impressive, not to mention the roster of heavy-hitters in both the poetry and film genres.
Organiser Alastair Cook emphasised the point that the film-poem genre is an inclusive and encouraging one–suggesting that we all start somewhere, even if with the video facility on our smart phones, and start making film-poems. Particularly helpful in that regard was the first screening, an introduction to the film-poem. Luckily, most of the works that Alastair picked to illustrate the depth and range of this genre are also available online. What follows, below, are those films…
Watch. Enjoy. Make film-poems. Perhaps I’ll see you at a film-poem festival soon.” {Robert Peake}