Moving Lyrics

In June 2019, Moving Lyrics conducted a summer film school for the Russian-language students of the famous Indiana University Summer Language Workshop. After only two weeks, students and their professors learned the basics of filmmaking and produced 6 films, based on some classical Russian poems (by Mikhail Lermontov, Korney Chukovsky, and Dmitri Aleksandrovich Prigov), a classical Ukrainian poem by Lesya Ukrainka, a prosaic excerpt from Joseph Brodsky’s essay, and also a poem written in Russian and translated into English by the very professors of the IU Summer Language Workshop. This was an immersive experience for the participants as well as the organizers of the workshop, demonstrating that creative work aimed at an artistically valuable result, is a catalyst in learning a language and understanding a culture. Transforming poems into films turned out to be both creative and analytical, but most important, the students—and their mentors!—were carried away by being the co-authors of the poems they cinematized, so that at some point, while mastering the language of cinema, the students had almost forgotten they were interacting with us and one another in their second language, Russian, which was exactly one of the goals of this particular version of Moving Lyrics. The IU Language Summer Workshop exceeded our highest expectations, and working with the students and the professors teaching them was a privilege. We hope to keep developing Moving Lyrics in this direction as well, from an international festival into a communal endeavor—across media, across languages, across universities, and across borders. Our special thanks to Professor Maria Shardakova and Professor Kathleen Evans for making Moving Lyrics at IU a reality. Visit our website to watch the highlight films of Moving Lyrics at IU and see the photos from our workshops and the screening with a Q&A:

MOVING LYRICS Poetry = (E)Motion......................................

Dear Friends!
Finally! Now you can watch this year's films and learn the awardees' names!

Grand-Prix — Eliza Dante
1st Place — Svetlana Matyushina
2nd Place — Ben Kogos
3rd Place ​- Dasha Badikova

New York Audience Award — Svetlana Matyushina

Best Translation (by a participant) — George Liseyev

Best Reading — Katya Balakireva

Creative Multilingualism — Aleksandra Jakubczak

Moving Lyrics 2018 This is "Moving Lyrics 2018" by Olga Lvoff on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them.

Our project creator Olga Lvoff Lvoff is being interviewed by the Voice of America 📽

Our project creator Lvoff is being interviewed by the Voice of America 📽

Photos from our today's screening at Hunter College!