Here we present you a selection of the best poetry films of the last years of the Zebra Poetry Film Festival in Berlin, curated by Thomas Zandegiacomo Del Bel, film curator, media scholar and artistic director of the festival.
The films will be projected from October 11 to November 30, 2021 - from sunset to midnight - onto screens placed in the store-front windows of the Goethe-Institut Montréal (1626 boul. St-Laurent, Montréal, Québec, H2X 2T1).
All films will be shown in the original with English (some with French) subtitles.
2009 Last Day of Republic (Letzter Tag der Republik)
Germany | 2009 | 08:57
Director: Reynold Reynolds
In 2008, the Palace of the Republic completely disappeared from the cityscape of Berlin. But can the demolition of a historical building erase cultural memory?
Poem: Letzter Tag der Republik by Gerhard Falkner
Beware of the Germans: they unexpectedly pull a poem out of their pocket and start a conversation about philosophy.
In a game reminiscent of Wheel of Fortune, a poem plays out on a letterboard. As the doll-like hostess turns over the letters, a surprising message to her audience is revealed.
“One must be able to move but also be as still as a tree: as the trees have rooted themselves in the ground, as we stand fixed, despite the landscape pulls away." (Hilde Domin)
Poems: Noch gestern / Wie wenig nütze ich bin / Ziehende Landschaft by Hilde Domin
Ode to Anxiety is an animated exorcism: a short ode is expressed to one of the greatest plagues of our society, anxiety, while she continues to dance on our stomach.
Whoever is having a drop too much today, will feel the overflow of rohypnol and embark on a trip within the ocean of the unconscious. In this experimental movie, images of the ocean sphere plus poetry unify in an almost classical transcendence.
Italy | 2019 | 09:00
Director: Eduard Escoffet, Gianluca Abbate
The voice that fills this film takes us to different spaces in Matera, from the tourist centres and city centres to the impregnable space of one’s own body: pleasure
and longing for other bodies that no one can pick up.
USA | 2020 | 05:59
Directors: Pamela Falkenberg, Jack Cochran
A film based on an erasure poem that works with texts from James Howard Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere. An indictment of American car culture and hostile urban environments which come into being when cities are only designed around motorway
systems.
2020 Speech by the Leader on the Occasion of the Future
Netherlands | 2020 | 07:10
Director: Jan Baeke, Alfred Marseille
Speeches held by heads of state encounter the guerilla tactics of poetry. Banished into the urban outdoor advertising and cut up into slogans, the sentences of the grand seducers lose their charismatic force rather quickly.
Poem: Speech by the Leader on the Occasion of the Future by Jan Baeke
The ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival
at the Goethe-Institut Montreal
The ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival is a project of the haus für Poesie in Berlin and has been around since 2002. It was the first and is the largest international platform for short films based on poetry - the so-called poetry films. It offers poets, film and festival makers from all over the world a platform for creative exchange, brainstorming and meeting with a broad audience. With a competition, film programmes, readings, retrospectives, exhibitions, performances, workshops, colloquia, lectures and a children's programme, it presents the diversity of the genre of poetry film in various sections.
The programme presents a selection of the best poetry films from previous editions of the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival. Twelve animations, written and experimental films on personal destinies, social issues and climate change. In the poems, these topics are questioned with emotion, logic but also wit.
