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Online film-poetry workshop and filming in The Royal Birmingham Conservatoire.

WRITING HOME, SHELTER

A film-poetry workshop exploring the impacts of homelessness and bad housing on mental health. Through weekly online sessions, over the course of a month nine writers, that each had lived experience of homelessness, completed a filmmaking and poetry workshop and collaborative writing.

The workshop co-designed with Will Harris, included sessions on language of resistance, Haiku, power and the genres of essay film and creative documentary. The freeform mediums of poetry writing and essay film, allowed experimentation and for the group to embrace unknowns and freedom of expression.

In the final part of the workshop the group wrote a poem that they would go on to film. To allow for collaborative writing, Will Harris devised a framework, based on Renga – an ancient form of Japanese linked poetry. The structure meant each person would respond to the writer who had gone before, and that no word or line could exist without the others. In a live online document, the group wrote ‘Jenga’.

Filming of the poem took place in The Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. This was the first time the group had met in person. The lines were delivered to camera by the person that had written them.

Morning mist
You feel like the morning mist.
When the sun comes up you fade away.

By Edward Russel, Writing Home

Jenga, Shelter

Dur: 3’49