Cinematically inclined scent-o-philes are encouraged to indulge their creativity with a plunge in to the world of short films… As Clara Molloy, founder of MEMO Paris perfumes breezed through town, today, to launch Eau de Memo (watch this space!), she told us all about a rather exciting competition that we know many of our artistic readership would love to get involved
MEMO Paris perfumes have established a weekly competition of poetic films – merely between 20 and 30 seconds in length, yet expressing timeless stories far deeper than the actual time frame may suggest. Through MEMO’s dedicated Cinéhaïku website, film directors both amateur and professional are invited to express themselves through a simple exercise: adapt the rules of haiku to an audiovisual format.
So what, exactly, is a Haiku? Well, Jack Kerouac put it as ‘A sentence that’s short and sweet with a sudden jump of thought in it, is a kind of haiku,’ though if you want a more in-depth description, there are countless websites dedicated to the art and history of this poetic medium. But how to translate this in to a short film? The rules to follow are on the Cinéhaiku competition page under how to participate, but basically it’s a 20-30 second snippet of something that ‘captures a lived moment.’
Each week, from March 6 to June 29, 2017, a winner will be chosen by Cinéhaïku members and awarded a $500 prize. The prize-winning films are then automatically entered into the Cinéhaïku Festival to compete for the annual prize. The overall winner of the year’s best Cinéhaïku will be invited to France to receive a quite incredible $10,000 prize awarded by a professional jury selected from the world of art, film and literature, and the winner will also be given a separate, dedicated space in the festival.
Cinéhaïku say: ‘The annual Cinéhaïku festival will showcase all of the weekly winning films at a temporary exhibition held from July 7 to 21, 2017 throughout the town of Gordes, in the Luberon region of southern France. The Cinéhaïkus will be broadcast on screens along an aesthetic trail, providing festival-goers with a true moment of poetry suspended in time.’
Our film would just have to be about perfume and the sense of smell, of course – but what would you haiku…?
Written by Suzy Nightingale
Tag: poem
The Mighty Nose Awards are open: calling all smell lovers aged 7-11!
Marty the Mighty Nose is a cartoon character created by The Fragrance Foundation to encourage children aged 7-11 to be inspired and engaged through their sense of smell. Offering a website aimed at teachers, full of ideas to extend their pupil’s learning by focusing on the smelly world around them, and a series of free workshops for schools; perhaps the most exciting activity for kids to get involved with is the annual Mighty Nose Awards…
Every year, The Fragrance Foundation invite pupils to submit smell-inspired creative writing for the chance to win fantastic prizes for themselves and for their schools. And entries for 2017 are now open!
The competition closes on December 16th 2016, so click here to download your entry pack and learn more.
As the Fragrance Foundation explain: ‘Marty the Mighty Nose is supported by a team of people including teachers, and developed by the Fragrance Foundation UK. We are a not-for-profit educational organisation and all our members are in the fragrance industry, supporting Marty as a philanthropic initiative.’
Winners will be whisked to the glittering awards ceremony held at BAFTA next year, as part of the Jasmine Awards, before an audience of writers, fragrance professionals and press, who always receive them with rapturous applause. Truly inspiring, it’s wonderful to see kids explore and develop their sense of smell – and along with it their creativity (and humour!)
We adored hearing last year’s winning poems being read, and to get a sense of how brilliant they were, here’s one of our favourites from 2016…
The Smells Inside My Brother’s Room
By Isaac Littlewood
St Mary’s CE Primary School, Year 3
The smells inside my brother’s room,
Just like his pants are deadly.
They lead me to my utter doom:
A very whiffy medley!
His slippers smell of nasty cheese
And the tang of onions (pickled).
Inside, his toes my nose displease
Especially when they’re tickled!
His bum smells like a rotten drum,
Full of ugly fleas.
It’s worse than getting badly stung
By a swarm of bees.
His armpits smell like cabbage leaves
Rotting at the dump.
Their pong you simply won’t believe
It’s like an evil trump.
Underneath his bed there lurks
A very hissy dragon
Who eats my brother’s hairy shirts
And smells enough to gag on!
So don’t go in that smellsome site
If you value your nose.
Your nostrils will be harmed for life.
His pongs are your greatest foes!
You can read all the winning entries and download the competition pack on Marty the Mighty Nose’s website.
We know so many of our readers enjoy sniffing our Discovery Boxes with their children, and at several of our How to Improve Your Sense of Smell Workshops, people have come along with their kids, who have wholeheartedly thrown themselves into finding creative ways of describing smells. So, if your children are budding ‘noses’ or simply brimming with whiffy words, we urge you to enter them into the competition!
Written by Suzy Nightingale
Are you 'Messy Sexy Just Rolled Out of Bed'? Read the Marilyn-inspired poem & revel in the scent…
A mysterious perfume house run by a reclusive man, a fragrance inspired by Marilyn Monroe‘s minx-ishly tousled photo shoot alluringly wrapped in sheets and immortalized by Douglas Kirkland in 1961, composed by one of this century’s greatest perfumers – Dominique Ropion. The elements of intrigue are all there, and this latest launch by A Lab On Fire doesn’t disappoint. With a cheekily suggestive name like Messy Sexy Just Rolled Out of Bed, well, how could we resist a sniff…?
A Lab On Fire is a niche brand that delights in being shrouded in mystery, asking some of the most brilliant noses in the world to create the fragrances they have always dreamed of making, letting their imaginations and talents run wild. Founded by a chap called Carlos Kusubayashi, we are told he was born in São Paulo, Brazil, grew up in Japan, and now lives in Texas; that he’s variously worked in a car factory, as an apprentice to a ‘Master Kyoji’ in calligraphy, and contributed toward bringing Asian art to the Parisian art scene. But quite why he turned to perfume remains quite the mystery.
Clearly exploring his own creativity, though, he released an accompanying poem to evoke the spirit of Sexy Messy Just Rolled Out of Bed. How fitting to read it on National Poetry Day…
Simple, clean sunlight. Warmth from the sheets wrapped between my legs. Warmth from you lingers on my skin. I just rolled out of bed. The rest of the day, the night—what we can do together—depends on how the sun warms my body, how close I allow you to get, how we touch.
Kusubayashi adds ‘The pictures of Marilyn are the quintessence of being sexy, a way of entering into the intimacy of the great diva full of hopeful innocence. There is something magically vulnerable in these photos, the light, the atmosphere… And this is the initial inspiration which I asked the nose Dominique Ropion to capture in a bottle’.
And so how does this ‘morning after the night before’ scent unfold on the skin? The opening is a slowly unfurling blossom, an indulgently joyous yawn into the warm skin-like softness of rose petals and peach fuzz underpinned by smooth woods, milky musks and something suggesting the reason those sheets are rumpled…
It’s the olfactory embodiment of ‘I woke up like this’ déshabillé diva that looks effortless in a photo shoot, but in our experience is somewhat harder to attain! At least now we can keep this by the bed to spritz on some instant glamour…
Messy Sexy Just Rolled Out of Bed £90 for 60ml eau de parfum
Buy it at Avery Perfume Gallery
Written by Suzy Nightingale
