HaikuLife Film Festival
On 17 April 2015, The Haiku Foundation inaugurated the HaikuLife Haiku Film Festival, a video project celebrating the diversity of approaches to haiku, as part of International Haiku Poetry Day. You will find a wide range of treatments of film treatments, all with haiku serving a central role in their inspiration and production. We offer these films in several formats: HaikuLife format, free format, feature format, and video haiga. This introductory film tells you about the origins of HaikuLife, and how to create your own video in this format. We look forward to sharing your work in the next HaikuLife Haiku Film Festival!
Welcome to HaikuLife
Artist: Jim Kacian
Format: HaikuLife
Duration: 4:51
Additional Information
International Haiku Poetry Day is a gathering of poets from around the world at an electronic meeting space hosted by The Haiku Foundation on April 17 each year. It’s an enlargement of the Foundation’s successful National Haiku Poetry Day. But rather than create dozens of small gatherings, as we have done in the past, we will host a single event that all haiku poets can attend on line. We hope you and your organization will want to create a HaikuLife presentation to share with haiku lovers around the world.
HaikuLife is both a program of haiku videos offered on International Haiku Poetry Day, and The Haiku Foundation’s video presentation format. Our inaugural HaikuLife program will include videos in the HaikuLife format as well as other formats.
Your video can be about anything related to haiku. The most common content for haiku videos will be readings of chapbooks, or else readings of anthologies by groups, or else videos that introduce a group and its activities to the haiku world, or else videos that outline an upcoming project or program. However, we hope you will not be limited to these content areas. Surprise us!
The HaikuLife video format consists of 17 segments, each 17 seconds long. A segment can be a single slide, a set of slides, even a video clip. Seventeen seconds is long enough to read two haiku — or one haiku twice — with proper space for natural breathing.
No, we will present many other formats as well — the most common being video haiga, free format, and feature format. But we encourage you to try the HaikuLife format.
We need to have your work in hand by April 10 — that is, as least one week prior to screening.
All presentations need to be made available in a standard video resolution — we have a preference for .mp4 — but if you are using any of the existing video software, we shouldn’t have any problems screening your offering.
Be creative and have fun!