Year: 2019

»As an artist I have a voice …«

An interview with the Dutch animation artist Anna Eijsbouts. Last year, her film »Hate For Sale« won the Audience Award at the Weimar Poetry Film Festival and the ZEBRA Award for Tolerance. Anna tells us about how she became an animation director and gives us an insight into the making of her poetry film. Aline Helmcke: Your animated short film »Hate For Sale« investigates what makes hate so tempting to the human kind. This film seems very relevant in a time where we have to deal with the fact that hatred is growing to a frightening extent in our society. Was there a specific incident or personal event that made you choose this topic for your film? Anna Eijsbouts: Well, it just felt like the world as a whole was going down a spiral: Trump, the refugee crisis, women’s rights being questioned and taken away worldwide, democracy being tainted by extremely subjective news sources. As an artist I have a voice and in the words of Nina Simone a duty, so I knew that the …

Editorial: The Cinema of Poetry

Dear readers, At the beginning of May Cinema, a new anthology about the history of cinema, was released by the publisher Elif. Gathering a wide range of texts, authors like José Oliver or Ulrike Almut Sandig express their fascination for cinema in a captivating way. The Poetry film Magazine’s new edition wants to address this matter, just in reverse: we would like to dig deeper into the fascination for poetry, addressing the filmmakers’ and directors’ point of view. This direction of looking at the relation between poetry and film seems to have gained significance lately. We would be neglecting the influence that poetry had on the development of the visual language of filmmaking if we reduced poetry film to a mere translation of a poem into a video. Since the beginning of the 20th century, filmmakers took inspiration from poets and poems, using them as an inspiration, guideline or challenge for creating moving image work. This “Cinema of Poetry” – the title refers to an influential yet critical text from 1965 by Pier Paolo Pasolini …