While working for the International ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival, Berlin in 2008, I was fascinated by the great diversity of submissions and new genres of narrative in film and poetry. I am a documentary filmmaker and I’d been writing poems (unpublished) since I was young. ZEBRA inspired me to create a poetry film based on one of my poems. As I started developing my own script based on my poem “Elephant,” I became increasingly aware of the challenges one faces when translating poetry into film. In my poetry, I rely on metaphors for describing feelings, moods and situations. The language of film, however, mostly expresses itself through visual moments and metaphors. It came to my mind that dance as a media transfers feelings and moods into physical actions and would be perfect for conveying the meaning of my poems within visual media.
