international
short film festival
in the palace

Synopsis: An anthology of seven poems lavishly animated for Remembrance Day. More poets and writers fought at the Battle of The Somme than any other battle in history. These ‘Soldier Poets’, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Isaac Rosenberg amongst others, captured the realities of war with a visionary flair, equaling the best filmmakers today. The Somme in Seven Poems is commissioned by BBC iPlayer and BBC Arts and is a collection of animated poems created by BDH for the feature length documentary War of Words – Soldier Poets of the Somme by BBC Arts. The film opens with aerial footage of the Somme revealing the exact positions of the writers in the present day fields of Northern France. The collection represents some of the greatest war poetry ever written. The animation starts with THE KISS - a controversial poem by a young officer Siegfried Sassoon, apparently writing of his eagerness for battle. Elsewhere, Isaac Rosenberg describes the daily torment for all soldiers in the battle – an infestation of lice, in LOUSE HUNTING. David Jones, a private in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, created a book length poem, IN PARENTHESIS, that remains a modernist tour-de-force. Here, he describes the carnage of an assault on Mametz Wood, blending his experiences with Welsh mythology and visions of the ‘Queen of the Woods’. W.N Hodgson writes BEFORE ACTION, preparing himself for a battle in which he would die on the first day, and Robert Graves finds a cure for “lust of blood” in the uncompromising A DEAD BOCHE. The Somme in Seven Poems comes full circle, with Sassoon’s bitter attack on the pro-war establishment and his powerful poem ‘THEY’.