Festival internazionale Segni della Notte - Urbino |
International Festival Signs of the Night - Urbino |
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18° Festival internazionale Segni della Notte - Urbino (4° Editione) - March 24th - 28th, 2021
ONLINE EDITION9 |
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Terranova |
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Alejandro Pérez Serrano, Alejandro Alonso Estrella |
Cuba / 2021 / 0:50:00 |
Cities do not repeat themselves; they transmute. Some cities are created by philosophical ideas. The lively city portrayed in TERRANOVA is made of reflections, memories of other cities, and visions of the future. It has a certain solemnity in its soundscape, without losing those strong sounds that make it unique. This particular universe that has been brought together contains many magical scenes that are filmed through a camera obscura.
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JURY STATEMENT:
‘Terranova’ is a film that contemplates the formation of a city from different perspectives with carefully constructed imagery, lighting, camera movement, text and soundtrack. The well-edited film has a magical and ritualistic quality that falls between realism and poetics.
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SIGNS AWARD
The Signs Award honours films, which treat an important subject in an original and convincing way
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Masters of the Land |
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Jan Locus |
Belgium (Mongolia) / 2021 / 0:14:00 |
The rise of mining made post-communist Mongolia the fastest growing economy in the world in 2012. However, the poor were not profiting from this booming industry, and climate change plus overgrazing were leading to vast desertification. According to Mongolian shamanistic belief violation of nature by men provokes the anger of the ruling spirits or the ‘masters of the land’. Texts by shamaness Kyrgys Khurak and Hungarian poet Ferenc Juhasz, who experienced the painful initiation of a shaman in 1957, cut the medium long shots. Interweaving the rich spiritual Mongol tradition with a visual portrait of the country, Masters of the Land submerges the viewer in an intoxicating finale
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JURY STATEMENT:
`Masters of the Land’ presents a surprising image of Mongolia, the coal mines and the industrial look of the capital contrasts the monumental and spiritual character of the land, and provokes us to consider the relationship between substantiality and spirituality.
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DIRECTOR STATEMENT:
Shamanic voices evoke the lurking greed that eventually might destroy nature – an aspect that implicitly refers to the climate crisis. Shamans who play an important role in the rich spiritual Mongolian tradition have warned for this in the past, how do people relate to their ancestors when desires threaten to upset the cosmic balance?
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NIGHT AWARD
The Night Award honours films, which are able to balance ambiguity and complexity characterized by enigmatic mysteriousness and subtleness, which keeps mind and consideration moving
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Antelopes |
Les Antilopes |
Maxime Martinot |
France / 2020 / 0:08:14 |
One day, one hundred and fifty years ago, thousands of antelopes threw themselves into the sea together.
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JURY STATEMENT:
‘Antelope’ is a wry and very effecting essay film, exploring the prevalence of surveillance and the seemingly universal use of drones in our world, in a work ingeniously constructed from found footage.
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DIRECTOR STATEMENT:
Marguerite Duras wrote Les Yeux verts (Green Eyes) in the June 1980 issue of Cahiers du Cinéma. The text describes a legendary event as well as a mystery: what drove one day, all of a sudden, hundreds of antelopes to mass suicide
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This desperate act connecting several members of a species, pushing them to a common and un- coordinated action, like an uprising, deeply moved me. It echoed with an anger I felt at the time, related to the state world we live in. The need to make a film out of it quickly struck
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While searching on the internet, I came across hunting videos, and especially videos of drones tracking down antelopes. Their grace and beauty were put on show for the only benefit of men. From video to video, something of a generalized practice became clear to me. A new anger arised. How to live if one is constantly observed, hunted down? How can they resist the constant and deadly feeling of danger that literally hovers over their heads?
I saw in these videos an answer to the mystery Marguerite Duras wrote about in Les Yeux verts. An- telopes choose self-destruction over the endurance of the human’s obsession to dominate.
What a good news, and thank you a lot for bringing Antelopes to the screens ! It brings us hope and strength in keeping making films that try to experiment their own ways of cinema.
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