Festival internazionale Segni della Notte - Urbino |
International Festival Signs of the Night - Urbino |
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7° Festival internazionale Segni della Notte - Urbino - November 21th - 26th, 2023
21th International Festival Signs of the Night - Italy
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La Colline |
Denis Gheerbrant, Lina Tsrimova |
France, Belgium / 2022 / 1:17:00 |
A hill in Kyrgyzstan inhabited by men, women, some children. Smoke, birds, a waste dump like a Leviathan. Among them, a traumatized former soldier, a grieving mother, young people deprived of a future, living and facing their destiny.
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:JURY DECLARATION
People who have experienced tragedies that have removed them from society, have created a parallel community by living with the world's rubbish. They draw life from the trash but are reduced to rubble. Their human dimension resurfaces, and human dignity re-emerges even in such a marginalized context. The film tells their stories crudely and gently, symbolizing a hill of symbols and their fierce opposition to all forms of resignation in the final stake, which could also be the stake of hopes.
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Director Statement
It is no coincidence that "Segni della Notte" distinguishes a film in which we honor those plunged into the night of history. We would not call it a "spotlight", but a more humble illumination, like Pasolini's fireflies. And so it is with cinema in its primary function of conveying a vision.
Il n’est pas anodin que « Signes de nuit» distingue un film qui honore celles et ceux qui sont plongés dans la nuit de l’Histoire. Nous ne parlerons pas de « coup de projecteur » mais d’un l’éclairage plus humble à l’image des lucioles de Pasolini. Il en va ainsi du cinéma dans sa fonction première de porter un regard.
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SIGNS AWARD
The Signs Award for Documentary honours films, which express in a
surprising and sensitive way the perturbing aspects of reality
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Bong Thom |
Ahmed Zaradasht |
Norway / 2022 / 1:24:00 |
Heng lives with his close knit deeply Buddhist family in rural Cambodia, who work hard struggling as farmers. At 6, he lost both his arms in a landmine explosion. Now, as a teenager hanging with the wrong crowd, and no future at the farm, his mother sends him to his older brother, Chana, who makes romantic music videos in the bustling city of Phnom Penh. Here, with a bossy brother, amid a So-Me, “wanna-be” culture, Heng must make it. A film about a family who are living the consequences of war which ended decades ago.
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JURY DECLARATION
The portrait of the two brothers who seek their place in Cambodian society while one of them suffered from his youngest age the consequences of the war, question our ability to live after collective traumas. How far must we go from the world we come from to finally become ourselves?
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NIGHT AWARD
The Night Award for Documentary honours films, which represent reality
in an ambivalent and enigmatic way, avoiding stereotypes of
representation and simple conclusions
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Daniel Kötter |
Germany / 2023 / 1:36:23 |
"Landshaft" sketches the psychogeography of a geopolitically charged landscape and its inhabitants between extractivism, war and displacement. In the form of a journey in eastern Armenia, the film follows human and non-human actors as they make their way through the landscape, from Lake Sevan to the Sotk gold mine, occupied by Azerbaijan since the Karabakh War in 2020.
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JURY DECLARATION
Through the territory he describes, Kötter manages to tell us about the war without showing it. The longest and quietest wars are fought at the border. The long shots, often perceived as discreet, allow the words of men and women who cross these territories daily to continue to resonate in us.
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JURY AWARD FOR A LUCID TESTIMONY
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Sarura. The future is an unknown place
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Nicola Zambelli |
Italy / 2022 / 1:20:00 |
At the gates of the Negev desert, a group of young Palestinians fight against the Israeli military occupation. "Youth of Sumud” - the youth of steadfast perseverance - try to return to their people the land that was taken from their families, restructuring the ancient cave village of Sarura.
They face aggression with nonviolent action, defending themselves from rifles with their video cameras; they oppose desolation and death with hope and life. Ten years after their first documentary on the nonviolent struggle in the West Bank, the directors return to the village of At-Tuwani and, using archival material more than 15 years old, tell how the children have grown up.They face aggression with nonviolent action, defending themselves from rifles with their video cameras; they oppose desolation and death with hope and life.
Today the caves of Sarura have been restored by a group of young Palestinians, gathered in a collective called “Youth of Sumud” (resistance): they are the sons and daughters of nonviolent militants of the popular resistance committee of the adjacent village of At- Tuwani, who for more than 20 years have managed to resist evacuation attempts of their land thanks to nonviolent actions and the solidarity of Israeli and international peace activists.
The boys and girls of YOS are trying to bring back life in the village of Sarura, planting olive trees, escorting the shepherds of the area with their cameras and helping other villages threatened with eviction orders by the Israeli government with their presence. A fragile but powerful struggle, capable of undermining the expansion plans of the government of Israel that would like to remove all the shepherds of the area.
With “Tomorrow’s Land” (2010) we talked about At-Tuwani’s experience of resistance, today with “Sarura” we want to imagine the future that will come together with the new generation
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JURY DECLARATION
Built on encounter and reunion, "Sarura" is a film that allows us to physically feel what it means to peacefully resist weapons and abject arrogance. Without falling into empathy, "Sarura" shows us the strength of the camera when it finds its place to tell the world.
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EDWARD SNOWDEN AWARD
The Edward Snowden Award honors films, which offer sensitive (mostly) unknown information, facts and phenomea
of eminent importance, for which the festival wishes a wide proliferation in the future.
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Bill Morrison |
United States / 2023 / 0:29:49 |
INCIDENT reconstructs a Chicago police shooting from 2018, reassembling the event and its immediate aftermath from a variety of viewpoints, including surveillance, security, dashboard, and body-worn cameras as a continuous, synchronized split-screen montage.
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JURY DECLARATION
By using images that the society considers as real and objective, Morisson depicts the brutality of the police in the USA. The images that allow them to monitor us also show the coldness of the imposed order. The film questions the use of the image as proof and the image as possible narratives.
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Tomaso Aramini |
Italy / 2023 / 0:20:00 |
15 years of artistic discipleship between me and radical filmmaker Romano Scavolini recollected through a series of audio fragments recorded by Romano in which he discusses his uncompromising conception of cinematic art. An operation of semantic archaeology, resignifying a continuous flux of ideas, thoughts, sequences from his films and beyond.
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JURY DECLARATION
What better way to tell Scavolini’s work than to make a film that resembles him! Between the meticulous editing of excerpts from his films, the graphic proposals and the voice of Scavolini that crosses our body, Killing Cinema finally sharpens our gaze.
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