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2nd ZEBRA Poetry Film Award

July 1– 4, 2004 at the Arsenal Cinema in Berlin

The ZEBRA springs from its hindlegs: the best bits of the programme of the 2nd ZEBRA Poetry Film Award

Rigorous competition and a large programme: from the 2nd to the 4th July 2004, in the Kino Arsenal, Potsdamer Platz, the literaturWERKstatt berlin shows the best films from the over 800 entries received from 57 countries. The films run in a competition, as well as in varied special programmes. An international jury, with Astrid Kühl, Steven Kushner, Michael Lentz, Reynold Reynolds, Anna Seifert, Andrea Ernst and Thomas Wohlfart, choose the winner from the 42 competition films. The ZEBRA Poetry Film Award is endowed with a total prize fund of €10,000, and is funded by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) GmbH. The ZEBRA Poetry Film Award takes place as part of the poesiefestival berlin.

Special Programme

The central poetry film competition is complemented be a special programme, containing over 100 films from 28 countries. Five short film programmes deal with the themes of love, the everyday, home, urbanity and politics: Feuer und Flamme (Fire and Flames) tells stories of love and passion; Poesie des Alltags (Poetry of the Everyday) presents the search for the seemingly insignificant and hidden things in life; Heimatfilme (Homefilms) defines the notion of home, here and elsewhere; Stadt, Land, Fluss (City, Country, River) contains poetic impressions from nature and towns and cities; and Generation Z bridges the gap between and politics.

It has again been clear this year that the poetry film has, above all, a homeland in Great Britain. In Very British the audience can be convinced of the wealth of ideas and high quality offered by current British poetry films. In addition, with Made in Berlin, the ZEBRA Poetry Film Award screens new poetry films from Berlin.

In On the Road to Berlin, Steven Kushner and Gerhard Falkner present the history of the Beatniks, with a film collage containing a large amount of unreleased video clips, as well as audio documents and television recordings.

The retrospective, Hat der Film bereits angefangen? – Ein historische Ausflug in den poetischen Schriftfilm (Has the film already started? – A historical excursion into the poetic literary-film), presented by Michael Lentz, addresses the combination of poetry and film, and the work of artists such as Nabuo Kubota, Maurice Lemaître, Arrigo Lora-Totino, Dieter Roth, Gerhard Rühm, Walter Ruttmann and Paul Ghawits.

The text, the image and the sound. That is the present – the moment: Bas Böttcher and Wolf Hogekamp have worked since 2000 in a medium that explores the new poems of the Spoken Word scene. The result of this work is shown in ‘Poetry Clips’, a collection of poetry clips, a sub-genre of poetry film in which the author himself speaks or stages his work.

The connection between poetry and the animation film as a special filmic form is the theme of the Film Talk. What moves a filmmaker to use a poem as the basis of an animation film. In discussion with Rolf Giesen of the Filmmuseum Berlin the motivations for such work will be sought. In addition, Rolf Giesen takes the audiece on a journey through the history of the animated film, and its north-American, European and Japanese roots and traditions.

The international colloquium, taking place in the GTZ building with the theme ‘Which roles to artists play in intercultural understanding?’, builds bridges between filmmakers from all parts of the world. In the dialogue, mutual entrances to other cultures through film and poetry should be developed, and differing means of viewing and understanding established.

The Jury

The international competition jury is composed of experts in the fields of poetry and short film. Steve Kushner (USA) lives in San Fransisco and is the founder of the ‘Cloud House Poetry Archives’, one of the largest and most renowned poetry archives in the world. Astrid Kühl (Germany), from the KurzFilmAgentur Hamburg, has already sat on numerous prize-juries and funding panels, and belongs to the allocation committee of the cinema prizes of the German Ministry for Culture and Media (BKM). Michael Lentz (Germany) is president of the Freie Akademie der Künste in Leipzig. His is known as an author, musician, interpreter of experimental texts and sound poet, and won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 2001 for his work ‘Muttersterben’. He his also a collector and theorist of poetry films. Reynold Reynalds (USA), who lives in New York, is a filmmaker and video artist. In his work he deals predominantly with the themes of trauma and catastrophe. The screenwriter Anna Seifert (Germany) is as a consultant of the Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg GmbH mainy concerned with the area of short film and new-development funding. Andrea Ernst (Austria) works as an editor of the WDR in Cologne, and is responsible among others for the art and short film magazine ‘KurzSchluss’. The Chairman of the Jury is Thomas Wohlfahrt, director of the literaturWERKstatt, and chief festival coordinator.

The 2nd ZEBRA Poetry Film Award is a project of the literaturWERKstatt berlin in cooperation with the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) GmbH and interfilm berlin, as well as with the kind support of the Goethe-Institut und the Instituto Cervantes.

Funded by the Haupstadtkulturfonds

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