Cadence Video Poetry Satellite Screening: A new place for these treasures
Undoing the ordinary, the familiar, and the forgotten, the video poems in this special screening bring past relics into the present, use common tools in expected ways, and transform everyday spaces into ritualistic settings.
In conversation with the wondrous domestic landscape of Dawn Cerny: Portmeirion, the featured video artists excavate and archive personal, familial, and found histories through language, craft, movement, and play. Objects are activated, memories are illuminated, and the private and public intertwine to reveal the importance of places and props in shaping our relationships.
Following the screening, join Cadence Video Poetry Festival co-directors Rana San and Chelsea Werner-Jatzke for an in-person and virtual discussion, bringing together participating artists from Seattle and across the globe to explore questions such as: what do we hold precious?
Save on a full festival pass! Registrants for this event will receive a code for 50% off their pass to the rest of the Cadence Video Poetry Festival in their confirmation email.
About Cadence Video Poetry
Cadence Video Poetry, co-directed by Chelsea Werner-Jatzke and Rana San, features an artist residency, generative workshops, and an annual festival that fosters critical and creative growth around the medium of video poetry. Cadence approaches video poetry as a literary genre presented as visual media that makes new meaning from the combination of text and moving image.
The 2025 festival takes place during National Poetry Month with in-person events April 25–27 at Northwest Film Forum and online April 25–May 4.
Films in this Program
legs
Three artists work in stride to translate, in sound and motion, the heart of a poem. They collaborate with the unexpected things in life—snapped clotheslines, drained swimming pools, terminal diagnoses—and learn what falls away is not necessarily gone.
Directors: Christine Fellows, Jennifer Still, Chantel Mierau; Poet: Jennifer Still, Canada, 2023, 14 min, in English
This One Thing
King County Recology’s Material Recovery Facility in Seattle is a curiosity: a site ripe for anthropological digs, offering a continual parade of infinitely mucky, diverse, commingled materials that form a collective portrait of desire, consumption, and willful forgetting. Along the route of the behemoth sorting machine, where humans pick out contaminants by hand, there is a place where paper waste is shuffled along: faded family photos, handwritten homework, Valentines and love letters, postcards and pornography. This film is about one such thing.
Amanda Manitach, US, 2023, 1 min, in English with hardcoded English text
whereverever
Recorded on location in Finland and Japan—the respective ancestral homelands of Canadian choreographic duo Mardon + Mitsuhashi—this docu-poem intertwines visits with relatives, folk and contemporary dancing, and playful noticings of rupture with a focus on gesture, movement, and impulse. whereverever is a spell to visit with ancestors past and future through the technologies of dreaming, dancing, and fabulating what isn’t and cannot be known—treating the gaps, tears and absences as valuable knowledges, too.
Alysha Seriani, Erika Mitsuhashi & Alexa Solveig Mardon, Canada, 2023, 16 min, in English, Finnish, and Japanese with English subtitles
Wandering Houses (Casas Errantes)
One poet visits the house of her friend, also a poet, in Lisbon. Both migrants from Barranquilla, Colombia, they journey together between clothespins, mango, and waves.
Directors: Lilián Pallares & Charles Olsen; Poets: Lilián Pallares & Lauren Mendinueta, Spain, 2025, 9 min, in Spanish with English subtitles
After Grace IV
As the artist disappears and reappears through a retrospective installation of their work, After Grace IV is a visual relic of Dez'Mon's first foray into performance art. In an attempt to hold space for opposing principles while escalating towards a common vision, the After Grace series has become an ongoing project where filmmakers create pieces based on the same poem—a poem that convinced a painter to strongly consider writing, then writing strongly advocated for performance, then performance insisted upon installation. After Grace, as a whole, is meant to remind the artist of origins, being green, the earnestness and eagerness of unrefined creativity holding the many hands of collaboration and possibility, being led in many directions in the hopes of returning as something familiar, however renewed.
Director: Camille Cotteverte; Poet: Dez’Mon Omega Fair, US, 1 min, in English
Stormers (Fırtına)
The playful dynamic between two people whose games shield them from reality is disrupted with the arrival of a third to their home. The newcomer shifts this flourishing space, changing the rules of the game and forcing all three of them to construct a new way of relating to one another.
Esme Madra, Türkiye, 2022, 17 min, in Turkish with English subtitles
This event is produced in partnership with the Cadence Video Poetry Festival and Northwest Film Forum.
Cadence Video Poetry Satellite Screening: A new place for these treasures
legs (still), 2023; courtesy of Christine Fellows, Jennifer Still, and Chantel Mierau
April 24, 2025
6–8 pm
704 Terry Avenue
Seattle, WA 98104