Sunday 26th November 2023
11.00am and 12.30pm
*** FREE & ONLINE ***
All shortlisted films will be screened at the 11th Winter Warmer festival, Nano Nagle Place, Cork while being streamed live via our website festival stage, Vimeo, Facebook and YouTube channels. 30 films were chosen from 208 submissions received from 168 filmmakers in 33 countries. The 2023 shortlist represents 14 countries: Belgium, England, France, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, Namibia, New Zealand, Scotland, The Netherlands, UK, Ukraine and USA.
This year’s judges Colm Scully and Paul Casey, will select one winner to receive the Ó Bhéal award for best poetry-film, designed by glass artist Michael Ray. The winner will be announced directly after the shortlist screenings at Ó Bhéal’s 2023 Winter Warmer festival.
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Sunday 26th November @ 11.00am |
Poem: Bloom Again
Synopsis – A powerful exploration of the complexity of a breakup and the sacrifices one must make in pursuit of personal fulfillment. It serves as a reminder that sometimes, even the deepest love cannot withstand the weight of many other parts of a relationship, leading to a heart-wrenching aftermath that forever alters the course of one’s life.
Director: Sandra Vazquez (Mexico)
Sandra Vazquez is a 20 year old artist born and raised in Aguascalientes, Mexico. She is a poetry and film enthusiast, director, painter, animator and the 2021 JCSI IEMMYS Award Winner with the one-minute short film “Anthills”.
Poem: For the Skeptical
Synopsis – A warning of the dangers to democracy posed by myths, lies, disinformation and propaganda.
Director: Dawn Westlake (USA)
Dawn Westlake is president of Ron de Cana Productions, Inc. in Los Angeles. She has made 23 films since 2000 which have won 100 awards in film festivals all over the world, and honors from Canon USA, Inc., JVC-Tokyo and MyAirBridge. Dawn is also an actress/writer/producer and has judged film festivals in the US, Italy, France and Portugal.
Poem: Scartin’ Midges
Synopsis – Looking at the lost art of peat cutting by hand, this drama features an Ulster-Scots poem by Charlie Gillen which uses terminology which is slowly being lost alongside the once popular tradition.
Parins, braid feet, stanks fu’ o’ kat,
Whut wud a city man mak o’ all that,
Broon, flough, gally, blak nixt the cliy,
Onnerfit or breeshtin, we know the wye.
Featuring the landscape of the North Antrim coast in Northern Ireland, the narrator goes on to reminisce about the local characters that he would meet on the moss, and about their fate since those olden times.
Director: Tristan Crowe (Northern Ireland)
Tristan has had a long career in the creative media sector with over 17 years experience creating documentaries, short films, music videos, podcasts, radio shows, and most recently, virtual reality experiences.
Poem: Marcasite
Synopsis – A heartwarming poem about a grandmother and granddaughter and the story of their wholesome relationship.
Director: Haniyyah Nauzeer (England)
Haniyyah Nauzeer is a third year animation student at the University of Brighton. Although Marcasite is the first of her films to be entered in film festivals, she has experimented with a variety of styles and animation techniques. Her hand drawn style is often described as being unique and identifiable, though she often experiments with mixing 2D and 3D techniques and looks forward to further exploring her passion for storytelling.
Poem: Cancer Alley
Synopsis – An experimental visual strategy and a disturbing soundscape combine with Lucy’s evocative words to show what environmental injustice looks like in the small Louisiana towns of “Cancer Alley,” one of the most polluted places on earth, dominated by more than 200 chemical plants and oil refineries, sometimes literally located in residents’ back yards.
Directors: Pamela Falkenberg and Jack Cochran (USA)
Pam & Jack met in graduate school and made films together when they were young. Jack left to become a professional cinematographer working out of LA and London, while Pam went on to become a professor and experimental filmmaker. Now reunited, they try to live up to their name, Outlier Moving Pictures, by making technically innovative and poetic films about life, love, landscapes, social justice, and the environment.
Poem: The Torrid Zone
Synopsis – An ecopoetry film-poem about carnal poetics and erotic entanglements from the tri-national poet Tania Haberland (German-South African-Mauritian) who co-creates with water – with the images and music of French media artist Carine Iriarte aka Poetics of Reverie.
Director: Carine Iriarte (France)
Carine Iriarte lives and works in the south of France, where the Mediterranean landscape and culture are part of her artistic work. She collaborates with poets, painters, musicans and singers to explore vibration through movement, touch, silence, slowness, poetic acts, symbolic language, bodily/fleshy connection to the mineral-vegetable-animal world as an erotic entanglement. In 2021, she launched “Poetics of Reverie”, a collaborative artistic project combining poetry, body, film, electro music, with the aspiration to poetically inhabit the world, essentially in a carnal way. Her main collaborator is Tania Haberland and “Poetics of Reverie” is born from that watery and boundless co-creation.
Poem: Museum under water
Synopsis – An exploration of the dreams and childhood memories of a young girl named Norma. Through different styles of animation — like hand-drawn rotoscope animation — and lyrical storytelling mixed with Oskar Schuster’s magical music, the film transports us into an underwater world where angels, St. Jacob, Walt Whitman, great-grandmother Gala and secret miracles come to life.
Directors: Angie Siveria (Germany)
Angie Siveria is a Ukrainian illustrator, filmmaker and poet. She was born in Donetsk, grew up in Mykolaiv, lived in Kyiv and currently lives in Berlin. Angie participated and won prizes at the following international film and video festivals: CYCLOP (2012-2015), ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival (Berlin, Germany, 2013, 2016, 2022), MOLODIST (Kyiv, Ukraine, 2015), the 4th & 10th Ó Bhéal Poetry-Film Competitions (Cork, Ireland, 2015, 2022), International poetry festival «Liberated Words» (Bath Spa University, Bath, United Kingdom, 2015), X International festival of amateur, student and non-professional film “KINOKIMMERIYA 2015” (1st and 3rd place, Kherson, Ukraine, 2015), Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival (New England, USA, 2016), Roma Poetry Film Festival “DoctorClip” (Roma, Italy, 2015), book trailer competition “Book fashion” (Kyiv, Ukraine, 2018), Kamianets-Podilsky International Film Festival “BRUKIVKA” (Kamianets-Podilsky, Ukraine, 2022), International film poetry festival “Fotogenia” (Mexico City, Mexico, 2022), and more.
Poem: Re:Growth
Synopsis – The hearing community has, through the course of history, treated the Deaf community as a particularly undesirable species of weed. This poem uses the metaphor of unwanted weeds as a way to process that history and reframe the community as a stubbornly resilient population, capable of growth and beauty.
Director: Douglas Ridloff (USA)
Douglas Ridloff is a poet and visual storyteller creating original works in American Sign Language. He has gained national and international recognition, having performed in Jamaica, Cuba, France, Germany, Israel, Australia, the United Kingdom, and in such venues as the Whitney Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Jewish Museum, the 9/11 Memorial Museum, Nelson-Atkins Museum, SITE Santa Fe, CUNY Graduate Center, the University of Chicago and the Harvard/Radcliffe Institute. Douglas’s work has been featured in NBC News, Circa, HBO, Vice, CNN’s Great Big Story, and at TEDxVienna and TEDxUniGeneva. His website is www.douglasridloff.com
Poem: A Red Negligee in a White Vanity Case
Synopsis – When her love affair with another man is discovered, a mother leaves her family for a time.
Director: Fiona Aryan (Ireland)
Fiona is an Irish filmmaker and artist living in Co. Wicklow. Her short films have been screened at Irish and international festivals. She won the Ó Bhéal International Poetry Film competition in 2019 along with poet Lani O’Hanlon who she regularly collaborates with.
Poem: Be a man
Synopsis – 110 teenage boys from two regions of northern Namibia reflected on pressure put by their communities, their schools and their friends on their understanding of manhood. The result of their brainstorming was turned into a poem. Five prominent male figures (actors, models, singers) and two dancers where invited to read/ interpret the poem. ‘Be a man, as they say. It can’t be that difficult, can it?’. This short is the pendant to another poem, ‘Be a lady’.
Director: Philippe Robert Jean Talavera (Namibia)
Born in France, Philippe Talavera has lived in Namibia since 1997. He created the Ombetja Yehinga Organisation (OYO), a Namibian NGO using Arts to create social awareness. Film credits include ‘Kapana’ (Best director, North East International Film Festival, UK), ‘Salute!’ (Sotigui Award best actor Southern Africa, Burkina Fasso), ‘Kukuri’.
Poem: Petrykivka
Synopsis – Petrykivka reconjures stories of heroism, everyday artifacts and spaces decorated with floral folk imagery, remediated viral video, and footage of acts of resistance and survival. Using object-based and hand-drawn animation, this DIY experimental videopoem vicariously witnesses and testifies to the transformative possibilities of imagination.
Director: Anne Ciecko (USA)
Anne Ciecko is a maker, writer, and educator based in Amherst, Massachusetts, USA.
Poem: Tiger Lilies
Synopsis – Raisa Troianker (1909–1945), a poet from avant-garde circles, came to Ukrainian literature from a Jewish shtetl. She is said to have left a traveling circus, where she worked as a tiger tamer, because of an affair with Volodymyr Sosiura – Ukrainian master of love lyrics (track includes the record of his original voice). Here they are singing a duet.
Director: Oksana Shchur (Ukraine)
Oksana Shchur is a Ukrainian publicist and literature project curator. She has curated and produced Ukrainian literature projects including multidisciplinary projects “Zhadan / Gurzhy: Fokstroty” (2021), “Beyond Any Curtain: Ukraine – Scotland” (2021), “Ukrainian Songs Of Love And Hate” (2022).
Poem: Eve
Synopsis – Eve is a short, animated poem that explores an alternative to the biblical tale.
Director: Meghann Plunkett (USA)
Meghann Plunkett currently writes television for various Shondaland shows and currently has a development project with Octavia Spencer for Hulu. She also served as a Poetry Reader for The New Yorker from 2018-2020. She is the recipient of the 2017 Missouri Review’s Editors’ Prize as well as the 2017 Third Coast Poetry Prize judged by Natalie Diaz. She was a finalist for Narrative Magazine’s 30 Below Contest, The North American Review’s Hearst Poetry Prize and Nimrod‘s Pablo Neruda Prize. She has been recognized by the Academy of American Poets in both 2016 and 2017. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2018, Pleiades, Rattle, Washington Square Review, Ó Bheal, and Poets.org, among others. Visit her at meghannplunkett.com
Poem: Samhain, Wisdom
Synopsis – An eco-poetry film celebrating the Celtic winter Festival of Samhain.
Director: Grace Wells (Ireland)
Grace Wells is an award-winning eco-poet, environmental writer, and more recently small-film maker. Nature, spirit-of-place and environmental concern have been large themes in her work ever since the publication of her debut children’s novel Gyrfalcon, which won the Eilís Dillon Award and was an International White Ravens Choice. Wells has published three books of poetry with Dedalus Press, most recently in 2022, The Church of the Love of the World. In 2021 Clare County Council Arts Office and Poetry Ireland’s selected her as Poet Laureate for Ennistymon as part of the Poetry Town project. Grace volunteers regularly for Hometree Charity re-establishing native woodland at various sites across Ireland. In 2021, she assisted Hometree in producing Under Summer Pastures, a collection of essays from some of Ireland’s leading ecological thinkers exploring Ireland’s endangered Temperate Rainforests. She runs ‘The Little Sanctuary’, a small nature preserve, forest-garden and retreat space on the edge of Ennistymon, Co Clare. Confined by the limitations and restrictions of the pandemic, Grace began making short eco-poetry-films which can be viewed at gracewellslittlesanctuary.com.
Poem: Blame the Fox
Synopsis – A response to the ever-increasing extinctions among bird species. Lovell’s poem won first prize in the Rialto Nature & Place Poetry Award 2022.
Director: Janet Lees (UK)
Janet Lees is a lens-based artist and poet. Her films have been selected for many festivals and screenings, including the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival, the Aesthetica Art Prize, and the International Vidoepoetry Festival. In 2022 her work featured in the landmark exhibition Poets with a Video Camera: Videopoetry 1980–2020, in Vancouver. She won the Ó Bhéal Poetry-Film Competition in 2021, and been placed and shortlisted in many other awards. Her art photography has been exhibited around the world and her poetry widely published in journals and anthologies. Her two books are House of water, a collection of poems and art photographs, and A bag of sky, the winning collection in the 2019 Frosted Fire Firsts prize hosted by the Cheltenham Poetry Festival.
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Sunday 26th November @ 12.30pm |
Poem: Paddington Maeve
Synopsis – Diana Dixon meets a woman who is homeless on the platform at Paddington Station in London , the homeless woman tells her her story.
Director: Diana Taylor (UK)
Diana Taylor has been working in Bristol, UK with local Poets making poetry films since 2009, and her films have been shown in major venues in around Bristol including the Watershed , the Arnolfini, Colston Hall M Shed and the BBC Big Screen.
Poem: The Voice in Wilhelm Fleiss’s Office
Synopsis – A woman with an unusual malady–cobweb buildup in the throat–receives an even more unusual treatment in this adaptation of a surreal poem by North Carolina writer Virgil Renfroe.
Director: Jim Haverkamp (USA)
Jim Haverkamp grew up in Iowa and lives in Durham, NC. His short fiction and documentary films have screened around the world, including the London Underground Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, the American Dance Festival, and the Chicago Underground Film Festival. He has toured on the Southern Circuit of Independent Film, served as a juror for the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, and was co-organizer of the Strange Beauty Film Festival. Jim also teaches for Duke University’s Department of Cinematic Arts and bowls occasionally.
Poem: Velella velella
Synopsis – An algaenous gathering of imagery, original score, discovered sounds and spoken word – Velella considers where we find ourselves, and where we’re going. By turns employing direction and drift, Velella asks what consciousness is this – that would take us so close to the edge; that could yet have a change of heart?
Director: Steve Smart (Scotland)
Steve Smart is a writer and visual artist based near Dundee in Scotland. He has been involved in a broad range of creative disciplines over many years, leading to collaborations with other artists, performers, and scientists in fields as diverse as dance, music, behavioural psychology, biology, medicine and poetry. Steve’s training was in science and in art, and he continues to be interested and involved in both.
Poem: Beatnik Sermon
Synopsis – All things are one thing, and that’s something, that one thing is all things.
Director: Matt Mullins (USA)
Matt Mullins makes videopoems and writes poetry, fiction, screenplays, and music. His videopoems have been shown at exhibitions, galleries, and festivals throughout the world and include screenings at Visible Verse (Canada), Zebra (Germany), VideoBardo (Argentina), Liberated Words (England), Ó Bhéal (Ireland), The Body Electric (USA), CYCLOP (Ukraine), Co-Kisser (USA), The Filmpoem Festival (Scotland), Rabbit Heart (USA), The International Film Poetry Festival (Greece), REELPoetry (USA), Cadence (USA), Festival Fotogenia (Mexico) and at many other venues. His poetry and fiction have appeared in online and print literary journals such as the Mid American Review, Pleiades, Hunger Mountain, Descant, decomP and Hobart. His collection of short stories, Three Ways of the Saw, was published by Atticus Books and named a finalist for Foreword Magazine’s Book of the Year. He is the Mixed Media editor of the online journal Atticus Review and currently teaches at Ball State University where he is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing. You can find a number of his videopoems at: vimeo.com/mattmullins
Poem: Becoming Bird
Synopsis – Becoming Bird is part of an Epic Poem written by Sinéad McClure during her MA in Creative Practice at ATU Sligo. Sinéad drew this digital image in time to the poem, in one take. She felt it important to show the drawing becoming itself, just like the bird in the poem, from a blank canvas.
Director: Sinéad McClure (Ireland)
Sinéad McClure has been published in The Stinging Fly, Southword, Ink, Sweat & Tears, Live Encounters and many other fine publications. As well as the co-authored poetry collection The songs I sing are sisters, with Scottish poet Cáit O’Neill McCullagh, Sinéad is also the 2022 winner of the Roscommon Chapbook Award with her debut chapbook The Word According to Crow. Her video poem Someone else’s war was shortlisted in the 2022 Drumshanbo Film Festival and on Ink, Sweat and Tears.
Poem: To Be Two
Synopsis – An origin story of becoming – two mothers, a son, a family. Bringing together the moments and the materials from the everyday, it focusses on the ways we, as a family formed through adoption, have made our bonds. To Be Two is a collage of video recordings, poetry, and animation painted with inks and dyes made from mud, rust, blackberries, nettle milk and river water gathered and adapted from my immediate and intimate surroundings. to describe how we imagine and manifest our selves through each other beyond the language of blood and DNA.
Director: Kate Sweeney (UK)
Kate Sweeney is an artist, video maker and writer based in the North East of England. Her video pieces have screened and been exhibited nationally and internationally including Sydney International Film Festival, Zebra Film Festival in Berlin, Manchester Animation Festival, AnimaTricks in Helsinki and International Poetry Festival in London. Kate is currently a research associate at Newcastle University, and has previously taught Fine Art, Animation and lectured in poetry-film. She has just completed her PhD exploring video practice in literary archives at Newcastle University, UK (2016 – 20).
Poem: The Torrential Melody
Synopsis – A town suffering a long drought entrusts its destiny to a wandering musician who has the power to bring rain with his accordion´s music.
The film is heavily influenced by the art of Thomas Downing (1928-1985) and the ‘spot paintings’ of Damien Hirst (1965-). The polka dot style made famous in their works is replicated in our film: the childlike geometric simplicity is a reflection of the fundamental primitivity of life, of “feeding and breeding”. Consistent with these themes of simplicity and crudeness, the film does not use music, choosing instead to rely on the natural sounds of the world around us: waves crashing on a sandy shore, and the whistling wind. The use of multiple readers is a deliberate reference to the poem’s themes of reproduction and replication.
Director: José Luis Saturno (Mexico)
José Luis Saturno is a Mexican filmmaker and writer. He majored in Film Animation at Concordia University, Montreal. His career oscillates between animation and live-action, while his life is between Canada and Mexico. With his filmography, he has participated in over 80 film festivals in at least 28 countries.
Poem: The Snowglobe
Synopsis – Christmas is a disgusting, commercial holiday that our main character, the Grumpy Man, truly despises, but cannot escape.
Director: Ambre Vanneste (Belgium)
Ambre Vanneste is an independent screenwriter/director passionate about the short film format. After completing studies in Film and TV production and producing multiple award-winning short films, Ambre founded indie-clips.com: a streaming platform devoted to promoting short films made by independent filmmakers.
Poem: Supernova
Synopsis – A figure in a snow-globe; a girl in a mask; a speaker on the verge of collapse; the possibility of a new beginning; a short-lived but brilliant death. In this short film, identities and realities are blurred, superimposed, shifted, and distorted.
Director: Flora Xie (New Zealand)
Flora Xie is a multidisciplinary artist based in Aotearoa New Zealand. Getting her start from photography, she has always been drawn to visual storytelling and aesthetics. She has been a director and cinematographer on a number of other short personal projects across various genres. Supernova is her official short film debut, and her first time adapting a poem for the screen.
Poem: Acer
Synopsis – There is one sunny day after a particularly hard frost when the leaves of some trees, that have been holding on as they turned color all autumn, drop. This happens in a short span of time turning into a shower of yellow backlit by the sun. Within a few hours there is a carpet of gold at your feet. This seasonal offering also leads to bleak winter months. This animation illuminates these hours; the gift they are, what they portend and what they promise.
Director: Kathryn Darnell (USA)
Kathryn (Kate) Darnell comes to animation and poetry film after decades as a professional calligrapher and illustrator in traditional media. A native of Michigan in the U.S., Kate creates art in both digital and traditional methods, often working back and forth between. Her calligraphic animated work has been shown at many poetry film Festivals. She has work in the international touring program, Poetry+Video curated by Marie Craven and as part of Lucy English’s The Book of Hours. Together with poet, Lucy English, her animation of Things I Found in the Hedge was awarded first prize in the 2018 Atticus Review Video Poem Competition. Her animation of Wally Swist’s Grace was awarded first prize at the 2022 Filmetry Festival of Poetry and Film. Her traditional work has been exhibited in many art shows and galleries in the U.S. She is a graduate of the University of Michigan School of Art and has also been a teacher of both college courses in art and informal workshops. She lives and works in East Lansing, Michigan.
Poem: π(Pi)
Synopsis – As you know, Pi is an endless random number. However, when you arbitrarily divide it, you can imagine things like year numbers, phone numbers, or certain statistical figures. Using this method, the eccentric poet I, POETAQ, has expressed the endless contemporary crisis in a poetic opera.
Director: POETAQ (Japan)
POETAQ studied under the late poet Hiroshi Kawasaki, and has been performing spoken word since 2001. He began making poetry videos (YouTube Channel @poetryreadingbypoetaq) in 2019, and has been doing collaborative readings with self-made poetry videos at Nuyorican Poets Cafe Online Open Mic since 2020. His other poetry films include The 3 Crises (Official selection 2021 ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival), The Haircut (Official selection 2022 ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival) and la luna (Official selection Art Visuals & Poetry Film Festival Vienna 2023).
Poem: Klopp – Pierre
Synopsis – A poet, a painter, a land. Materials on a canvas, words cross graphism in an artist book. The poet and the painter meet in a volcanic space. Both collect the spirit of this place and this spirit becomes a symbol. The artist book becomes the emergence of the earth’s impulses. Nature is Culture. There we feel poetry.
Director: Axel Clévenot (France)
Axel Clévenot, author and director for more than 30 years, makes films on history, society, science, arts, painting, music. He has been selected and awarded in many international festivals, including twice for the Europa Prize. He is interested in several forms of cinematographic writing and in particular 3D (IMAX project) and immersive “virtual reality” writing. He is currently developing a project between France and Taiwan: an immersive virtual reality video game and escape room.
Poem: Signs
Synopsis – An exploration of longing and connection in a rapidly changing world, and of love for place and the dissonance of separation from people we love in a local and global sense.
Director: Claire Kinnen (USA)
Claire Kinnen is a multimedia artist based in Sunnyside, Queens and grew up in Northern New York’s rural frontier along the Canadian border. Her work is a mix of poetry, narrative, and experimental film. Its themes include feminine strength, rural identity, and the politics of place.
She is currently an MFA student in the Integrated Media Arts program at Hunter College.
Poem: God’s Favour, Anne
Synopsis – To celebrate the 400th anniversary of the death of Anne Hathaway in summer 2023, this poem was commissioned for publication by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. The composite personality of the faithful and apprehensive Anne references a range of Shakespeare’s female characters as well as Tudor Royalty. The opening quote is Shylock’s from ‘The Merchant of Venice’. This poem recalls young Anne Hathaway as it recalls lost wives – Shylock’s Leah and his daughter Jessica – as a way of thinking about poems lost and lives left unrecorded: disappearing poetic moments in all our lives we have given away to others.
Director: Suzie Hanna (UK)
Suzie Hanna is Emerita Professor Animation at Norwich University. She is an animator who collaborates with other academics and artists, and whose research interests include animation, poetry, puppetry and sound design. She has made numerous short films all of which have been selected for international festival screenings, TV broadcast or exhibited in curated shows.
Poem: Samuel
Synopsis – The Poem ‘Samuel’ is part of Mischa Andriessen’s book ‘Winterlaken’ from 2019. The poems in this book form a web of connections to add extra layers of possible interpretation. Now that the poem is on its own in this short film, Andriessen and Brentjes searched for new ways to add those layers. A story about a mother and her son and their bond that is as fluid as the water in which she last saw him.
Directors: Mischa Andriessen & Arjan Brentjes (Netherlands)
Since his poetry book debut in 2008, Mischa Andriessen has had a successful writing career in the Netherlands. In recent years he has been experimenting with combining his writing with other art forms.
Arjan Brentjes started his career as a painter and switched to moving images in 2008. Since 2010 he has focused on making short films, the last years mostly animation.
