MOON International Video Poetry Festival Honors Films from Portugal, Switzerland, and Brazil
With a warm reception from the audience and packed theaters throughout the weekend, MOON – International Videopoetry Festival came to a close this Sunday, November 9, at the Templo da Poesia in Oeiras, with very positive results. The festival’s second edition attracted more than three hundred spectators over two days and featured about 30 films in competition, selected from more than two hundred submissions from different countries.
Over the course of two days, MOON presented a packed program that brought together film, poetry, and music, featuring curated screenings by Edgar Pêra and Duplacena, a poetry performance by Maria Barnas, and a film-concert by Tó Trips and Edgar Pêra, which brought the event to a close.
Award-winning films
First Prize was awarded to Three Proposals for a Fire, by the Penumbra Photography Study Group, recognized “for the elegance of its visual approach and the strength of its text, with the power of the words underscored by simplicity and conceptual rigor.”
Second Prize was awarded to Addicted To The Wound, by António Forte, João Øbo, and Rita Tormenta, recognized for its “poetic and aesthetic depth in exploring, with rare sensitivity, the relationship between pain and creation. The choice of black and white amplified the metaphor of the contrast between absence and presence, wound and healing, silence and expression, revealing an existential unease that lingers long after the video ends.”
Third Prize went to *behind the mountains*, by Swiss filmmaker Lena Rubitschung, described by the jury as “a beautiful exercise in imagination and memory that guides the viewer through relationships and losses, with words and images of great poetic intimacy.”
Honorable Mentions
The jury also awarded honorable mentions to the films *Mimosa Pudica: an epistemological parody*, by Henrique Vaz (Brazil); *Chororô*, by Clara Vieira Silveira and Iara Ferreira (Brazil); and *Blind Folded On The Highway*, by Rita Tormenta and António Forte (Portugal), highlighting “the diversity of styles and approaches present in this edition of the festival.”
With free admission and a program that spanned geographies, languages, and disciplines, MOON established itself as a meeting place for poets, filmmakers, and visual artists, promoting new forms of creation centered on words, images, and sound.
Organized by the A Palavra Cultural Association, in collaboration with the Oeiras City Council, and as part of the MAP— Mostra de Artes da Palavra—program, the festival once again highlights the vitality of contemporary creation and Oeiras’s role as a hub for dialogue among the arts.
