Festival internazionale Segni della Notte - Urbino |
International Festival Signs of the Night - Urbino |
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8° Festival internazionale Segni della Notte - Urbino - Aprile 10-14, 2024
22th International Festival Signs of the Night - Italy
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Paradise LTD |
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Jennifer Mattes |
Austria /2024 / 0:40:16 |
An essayistic, powerful remix of moving images, found footage, sound and text, images are assembled into a poetic cinematic journey whose brutality and simultaneous beauty make it impossible to look away and which aims to polarize.standing at the center of a utopian architecture, to philanthropic failed concepts of life, to the dying of an already dead sea, we get to know a view of war, myths, life and death that accompanies and marks a region and determines and divides the reality of life of its inhabitants on a daily basis. We are confronted with abysses and love, with heat and cold, with hope and despair. In the end, what unites all the contrasts is a common story.
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:JURY DECLARATION
Reflecting on the Israel-Gaza conflict is a common theme for filmmakers. This movie approaches the topic by adopting a universal human perspective, diverting our attention from the news to the realization that humans should not allow themselves to engage in acts of violence.
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:DIRECTOR STATEMENT
One of the impressions I had when editing this film and the 7th of October happened, one of them was fear. fear for how this will continue and how the situation in Israel and Palestine can ever be solved. Fear about how my friends over there are at the moment...Now this film becomes a document to its time and stays for the period of the war it was edited in, which was not the story of the film in the beginning. Today the situation has become even worse over there and nearly unsolvable. Time and war never stand still and I wanted to say that while I was shooting there in 2018/19 I met so many nice and helpful Israelis that were supporting me and my idea to tell a story about a parallel world or an utopian world of people who believe in a one-day-it-can-be-peace-situation. I hope they won´t lose their hopes and fight for the togetherness, similarities and union of human beings..what we are, each of us. what unites Israel and Palestine after all is a common history. I hope one day they will find a common path to walk on. in the end after all its such an ambivalent thing to me to feel happy concerning the topic and the case of this film.. But for sure I am very happy about...:)
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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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Vision d'été |
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Anna Crotti, Anais Landriscina, Lucrezia Giorgi |
Italy / 2023 / 0:20:00 |
"Vision d'été" narrates the journey of a young woman in search of a new look at the world around her. In the midst of a torrid summer, in which climate change once again appears in all its unstoppable power, the protagonist, a young Frenchwoman, calls her mother, telling her in a frantic manner that she feels crushed by the city atmosphere and is about to leave for a trip. What oppresses her is not only the sultriness or the traffic, but also the weight of an alienating gentrification process: she says she is no longer able to recognise her city, Marseille. What thrill do we feel in dominating the space around us? Are there still uncontaminated places where man and his marvellous artistic creations can coexist with other natural organisms in mutual respect, or has capitalism broken the balance by gradually sucking up every space, every resource, until an imminent, as much as definitive.
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JURY DECLARATION
The composition of images, voice, and chorus brings us into the narrator's mind and makes us stay there with her until the end. This movie has the magical power to drive us inside the parallel world when we are struggling to find our own place. It also raises many questions to which we are often left without answers. The story that is told helps us to see the world from a different perspective. Criticizing contemporary society and social differences, a young girl wants to leave the city where she was born. The city that lost its soul and charm. Seeking simple, basic elements after consumption of everything that can be possible but at the same time gives nothing. Reaching far in parallel reality, the existing world, which is not familiar to the people she knows, she feels. Drowning her soul in the rhythm of nature, rediscovering the imaginative power of silence, she finds her place. At different times, far away from skyscrapers, the hustle and bustle of the city. Where nothing matters but the most important---the earth. We are the Earth! Why doesn't my mom understand my feelings either? Do we need to explain what we feel? Are we allowed to see things differently, to reach another dimension, and to watch empty everyday life from that distance? The orthogonal shapes don't exist; everything always changes, said the guy with no name, and no passport.
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DIRECTOR STATEMENT
The impetus for the film came from personal loss and using walking as a way to process grief. I was reading Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust at this time. The idea of a walk as an act of remembrance, reflection, pilgrimage and protest felt relevant to me in terms of the stretch of coast I was walking both personally and in a more universal way. The loss was not just mine. Thinking about the climate emergency and energy crisis that we find ourselves in, the fact that the nuclear power station is being expanded into an area of outstanding natural beauty, in turn industrialising this part of the coastline, I wanted to document this moment by making a filmic response.
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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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Immaterial Terrain |
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Emily Richardson |
United Kingdom / 2023 / 0:07:33 |
Camera in hand, over the duration of a year Richardson repeatedly walked the Suffolk coastline from Sizewell nuclear power station to the mythic drowned city of Dunwich. These walks – pilgrimages and acts of protest – structure a film that documents a singular and fragile landscape at an uncertain moment: plans to expand the nuclear power station at Sizewell will have a lasting impact on the environment. ac
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JURY DECLARATION
What is our relationship with the land and the consequences of our actions upon it? The film rises important questions in a unique way.
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DIRECTOR STATEMENT
The impetus for the film came from personal loss and using walking as a way to process grief. I was reading Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust at this time. The idea of a walk as an act of remembrance, reflection, pilgrimage and protest felt relevant to me in terms of the stretch of coast I was walking both personally and in a more universal way. The loss was not just mine. Thinking about the climate emergency and energy crisis that we find ourselves in, the fact that the nuclear power station is being expanded into an area of outstanding natural beauty, in turn industrialising this part of the coastline, I wanted to document this moment by making a filmic response.
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JURY AWARD FOR THE VOICE THAT WAS HEARD AND SENT OVER THROUGH TIME AND DIMENSIONS TO LAST
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The Voice |
La Voix |
Robert Cahen |
France / 2023 / 0:09:51 |
The images of this short film are linked to the concrete music by Michel Chion, and let the monologue of Saint Antoine (Pierre Schaeffer's voice) unfold and offer itself completely. The imagery, presented in parallel pictures, is intended to be earthy and close to nature, rediscovering, when necessary, the material which is offered in a metaphor surrounded by mists. At the sound of the gunshot, concrete in the music, occurs this break in the discourse, and the image, like this gunshot, finds the Asian connotation of death. And the dream raises the human form, then a face which offers itself before disappearing in the tumults of an imaginary sea. The earth seen from the sky then the sky itself take us very far “higher always”.
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JURY DECLARATION
Simple existing forms and our perception of nature, sounds, light, and all possible feelings that our senses can encompass. Images of nature, accompanied by a voice narrating Saint Antoine's monologue, allow us to travel into a parallel reality, reflecting and contemplating the details, shapes and forms we see in everyday life. Listening to the "voice from the past", we ask ourselves how simple forms transcend time and all the changes that man can impose and exist despite being ignored imposed by modernity and the technological revolution.
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DIRECTOR STATEMENT
Sulla musica concreta di Michel Chion "La tentazione di Sant'Antonio", 1984, da G.Flaubert, (estratto da 10 minuti), con la voce di Pierre Schaeffer.
Le immagini di questo cortometraggio si uniscono alla musique concrete di Michel Chion e lasciano che il monologo di Sant'Antonio (la voce di Pierre Schaeffer) si dispieghi e si offra completamente. L'immaginazione, presentata in immagini parallele, vuole essere terrena e vicina alla natura, trovando quando necessario la materia che viene offerta in una metafora avvolta nella nebbia. Al suono dello sparo, concreto nella musica, avviene questa rottura del discorso, e l'immagine, come questo sparo, trova la connotazione asiatica della morte. E il sogno fa emergere la forma umana, poi un volto che si presenta prima di scomparire nei tumulti di un mare immaginario. La terra vista dal cielo poi il cielo stesso ci porta molto lontano, “sempre più in alto”.
Lla voce di Pierre Schaeffer così ben diretta da Michel Chion mi ha toccato moltissimo! Pierre Schaeffer era il mio maestro insengnante di musica concreta !
Le immagini della natura le immagini mi si imponeva, quelle della farfalla poi della nebbia emanata le sorgenti di acqua bollente, la farfalla filmata vicino alla tomba di Soseki, l’acqua da un luogo vulcanico a Kyushu.
>a musica di Michel Chion mi ha davvero ispirato
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MENTION FOR THE 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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The Spell of the Woods |
Le mal des forêts |
Eric Beauron |
France /2023 / 0:22:00 |
Joséphine, 23, lives on an isolated farm with her father and grandmother. At the milking parlour, the milk turns black again pushing Joséphine to venture into the woods where her father has always forbidden her to go. Just like her mother before her, she is irresistibly drawn there....
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JURY DECLARATION
Weavering together elements of mysticism, familial bonds, and the allure of the unknown, the film creates an immersive journey that challenges genre conventions and captivates audience expectations. It challenges us to question our own perceptions of the world around us, inviting us to to the world of mysteries that lie just beyond the edges of our understanding.
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DIRECTOR STATEMENT
With this film, I wanted to create a cinematic experience of the forest, a spell by the forest. I wanted the audience to be captivated by the film as Joséphine is by the forest. Music is therefore an essential element of this spell (a kind of cosmo-telluric force). Joséphine is looking for her mother, but her mother is the forest. This connection refers to the archaic sense of nature, the "phusis" of the Greeks, i.e. the power of generation and growth. I wanted us to feel that the forest is looking at us, that trees are like a community of brothers waiting for us. I hope that the images and sounds are powerful enough to take the audience in this initiatory and magical journey, out of the human language. It is very difficult to achieve this result because it is the coherence of the images themselves, and especially of the editing, which gave the film its own form, which does not come from the script. I wanted as much as possible to do without words, to get away from the language, to enter into a raw experience of images and sounds.
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