Programme: PoetryFilm event about “Heroes and Heroines” at Curzon Renoir, October 2009

Below are the details of the PoetryFilm: Heroes and Heroines event at Curzon Renoir Cinema in October 2009.

To tie in with National Poetry Day 2009 (08/09/09), the theme was Heroes and Heroines.

Heroes and Heroines celebrated included: Hitchcock, Rachmaninov, Bunuel, Dali, Madame de Pompadou, doppelgangers, Freegans, Gaston Bachelard and Rilke.

The full programme description from the event is below.

Sonal Sachdeva: More For Less (documentary film)
Martin and Alf have been living over the past few years as Freegans, living from the excessive waste generated by people and supermarkets. In a way they have chosen to go against the societal norm of having steady, paid jobs and yet survive well by not participating in the process of earning money and adding to the burden of existing over-consumption in western society, which creates far more throwaway waste than we can handle. Taking this stand leaves them more time to interact with members of the public. They have taken this to the next level by walking around London for 7 days with the strong conviction that by helping and serving people, and not worrying about where their next meal comes from, one truly begins to live.

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Marco Sanges and Alberto Bona: La Sonnambula (PoetryFilm)
The heroes are Hitchcock, Rachmaninov, Bunuel and Dali.
The heroine is Madame de Pompadour.
Bellini’s opera is unrelated.

The film was created using photograph stills.

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Ben Crowe: The Man Who Met Himself 
Ben Crowe left his job, bought a Super8 camera, and made this film, which was nominated for the Palme D’Or at Cannes 2005. A mysterious call, a photograph of a man, and a private detective compelled by the one case that finally got to him. On a stark but brilliant day in London, Austin Petersen takes a job from an anonymous client, a job he knows he should refuse. What happened to Stephen Maker? Did he fake his own death, or do doppelgangers really exist?

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Ben Crowe: Bound (World Premiere)
During a train journey through the English countryside a passenger is wrapped in the everyday mystery off remembering: his childhood home, a loving family and the future that awaits. The film is a eulogy of sorts and was inspired by the spaces, shapes, smells, objects, colours, patterns and sounds of “home”: all are fragments of a journey from childhood to adulthood to a vision of old age. The film is a commingling of pasts, presents and futures within a loving family and a changing world. We are always plural and social; our stories already written in part by the mistakes and failures, aspirations and sacrifices of earlier generations. Ben Crowe chose the title to suggest that to be “bound” is not to be “captured”. The film also draws on Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space and Rilke’s “The world is large, but in us it is as deep as the sea.”

Ben Crowe & Preti Taneja: Je Suis Ici

Je Suis Ici is inspired by being on holiday in the south of France and the slight mismatch between expectations and reality.

Poet Sophie Mayer wrote a poem in response to the film which she performed after the screening.

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Sophie Mayer: poetry reading

Sophie Mayer is a writer and educator. She studied and taught English Literature and Film Studies at the Universities of Cambridge and Toronto, and has taken part in the poetry performance and publication scenes in both of those cities, as well as in London, where she now lives. Her Various Scalpels (Shearsman, 2009) is her first solo collection.

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Luke Heeley: poetry reading

Luke Heeley’s poems have appeared in the pamphlet Ask for It by Name, The Times Literary Supplement, Reactions 4, The Wolf and online at The Poem. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 2002.
He collaborated with the poet and translator Luca Paci and the musician Rowan Porteous in making the poem-film London Trip-tych, and in 2007, was one of a group of poets commissioned by the BFI to write poems in response to its ‘Essentially British’ collection of films.

John Stiles: poetry reading

John Stiles is the author of the poetry collections, Scouts are Cancelled (Insomniac Press, 2002), and Creamsicle Stick Shivs (Insomniac Press, 2006), as well as the novels, The Insolent Boy (Insomniac Press, 2001) and Taking the Stairs, (Nightwood Editions, 2008). Featured on CBC’s ‘Q’, Much Music, and TVO’s ‘Imprint’, John has also written for The Globe and Mail and The Literary Review of Canada, amongst others. John and his poems are the subject of a documentary film, Scouts are Cancelled.

The readings were followed by a very interesting Q&A with the directors and poets. Topics covered included Freeganism (can chip shop fat be turned into diesel?), the benefits of tangential thinking, and the lost art of violin-making.