2nd ZEBRA Poetry Film Award

Cinema of the mind meets a world of pictures

Friday 2nd July – Sunday 4th July 2004
From 13.00 hrs
Admission: € 6/€ 4

Prize Ceremony:
Saturday 3rd July 2004, 19.00 hrs
Admission: € 12/€ 8

Kino Arsenal 1 & 2
Potsdamer Strasse 2
10785 Berlin

 Ticket Reservation: 030. 26 95 51 00 

Full listings in the ZEBRA programme, or at www.zebra-award.org

Over 800 entries were recieved for the 2nd ZEBRA Poetry Film Award. An internationally composed jury will now choose the prize-winners from the 42 films that have progressed to the competition stage; the prize fund is endowed with a total of 10,000 Euros.

The extraordinary variety of submissions present the poetry film in an enormous spectrum of aesthetic plurality and possibilities. The origami-film ‘NORDEN’ from Britt Dunse (Berlin), for example, seeks a love story in the midst of notes and confetti. Whereas, the English animation ‘The Old Fools’ approaches humouous and earnestly the unavoidability of human deterioration and death, experimenting with a number of genres within animation, as well as the short feature-film. The eccentric short feature-film ‘Machine Molle’, from France, based on extracts from the texts of Allen Ginsberg, sees the young man Bill, infected with a language virus, being manipulated by two voices who talk to him through the radio. Again, many interesting compilation films were also submitted this year, among others ‘NIGGA’ from South Africa, which joins footage of the ‘60s and ‘70s Civil Rights Movement in the USA with contemporary poems confronting the country’s political state today. An internationally composed jury will select the prize-winners from the 40 films that have been nominated for the competition; the prize fund is endowed with a total of 10,000 Euros.

Over 100 films will run alongside the competition in seven film programmes that deal with the themes of love, the everyday, homeland and politics. Furthermore, the ZEBRA Poetry Film Award presents new poetry films from Berlin in ‘Made in Berlin’, as well as a focus on Great Britain in ‘Very British’. Last but not least, the poetry clip recieves again, with a programme, its own forum.

The retrospective ‘Hat der Film schon angefangen? – Ein historischer Ausflug in den poetischen Schriftfilm’ (‘Has the film already started? - A historical journey through the poetic text film’) examines the history of the poetry film. Included are contributions from poetic artists and filmmakers of the twentieth-century such as Gerhard Rühm and Paul Ghawits.
‘On the Road to Berlin’ shows the history of the beats with a film collage of video clips, audio documents and television recordings, presented by Stephen Kushner and Gerhard Falkner.
‘Filmtalks’ offers on Friday and Saturday, on both dates at 18.00 hrs, the opportunity of discussion with the guests of the ZEBRA Poetry Film Award.

Complementing the programme, an international colloquium on the theme ‘What roles do artists play in intercultural understanding?’ will take place, in cooperation with the GTZ, on the 2nd of July at 11.00 hrs (in the rooms of the GTZ, Reichpietschufer 20, 10785 Berlin).

Project Direction: Hajo Schäfer

The 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, and also with the kind support of the Hauptstadtkulturfonds and the Goethe Institut.

With kind support from: the Royal Norwegian Embassy; the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands and the British Council.

Special thanks is due to the Instituto Cervantes