Zebra Poetry Film Festival

When Poetry Becomes Film

The Zebra Poetry Film Festival explores a peculiar intersection: films whose starting point is a poem. Some illustrate the text literally, others translate the text into autonomous visual worlds — and some are pure sound-language films, in which poetry itself becomes the main character. The Haus für Poesie founded the festival in Berlin in 2002, establishing a genre internationally that had no dedicated platform until then.

June 4 to 7, 2026 — silent green Kulturquartier

The 14th edition (held biennially since 2002, and nearly annually since 2018) will take place from June 4 to 7, 2026, in the Kuppelhalle of the silent green Kulturquartier at Gerichtstraße 35 in Wedding. The former crematorium building from the 1910s has been one of Berlin's most important festival venues for independent film and performance for over a decade.

55 Films from 85 Countries

For 2026, an international jury has selected 55 short films from around 800 submissions — entries came from 85 countries. The program is divided into several sections: International Competition (spread over two days), three thematic programs on myth, grief, and connection, the youth program Zebrino, and a guest program from Argentina (VideoBardo), South America's leading poetry film festival. The awards ceremony will be held on Sunday, June 7, 2026.

Haus für Poesie — Center of the German Poetry Scene

The organizer is the Haus für Poesie, based in the Kulturbrauerei in Prenzlauer Berg, which has been the central platform for the German poetry scene for years. It organizes, among other things, the Poesiefestival Berlin and the online archive lyrikline.org. Zebra is the cinematic sibling of this program — more internationally oriented, with less focus on competition for audibility and more on visual translation.

Participate — Submissions Open

Filmmakers can submit poetry-based short films completed after January 1, 2024, and no longer than 12 minutes. All languages are welcome — translations and subtitles will be curated by the festival. In the Mitte district of Berlin, Zebra is one of the most internationally prominent Berlin film festivals and, at the same time, one of the city's most intellectually unusual formats.