Festival internazionale Segni della Notte / Urbino-Italy

MAIN AWARD

Transit

Telemach Wiesinger

Germany / 2025 / 0:14:43

TRANSIT is a 16mm film poem with a soundtrack by Martin Bergande, a visual journey across the borders of the EU to the edges of Europe with the aid of tangential force and the means of transport car, train, ship and aeroplane across the borders of the EU to the edges of Europe.

INTERNATIONAL PREMIERE

:JURY DECLARATION

For its meditation on movement, exploring the silent poetry of transportation through striking, monochromatic imagery. The film captures fleeting the moments of all kinds of travel (trains, tracks, water, wings and air) – but renders these both concrete, tracing the borders of Europe, and timeless, like any of our own journeys. The film invites the viewer to drift between spaces, evoking both physical journeys and inner voyages.

DIRECTOR STATEMENT

In "TRANSIT", I largely use travelling shots to show the passages, stopovers and personal locations on the routes through Europe to my feature-length film "12 ASTERISCI", which was made at the same time and will premiere in June 2025. Martin Bergande's musical approach of largely only allowing the black phases of the short film to be heard allows the sound film to remain a silent film to my ears.

SIGNS AWARD

The Signs Award honours films, which treat an important subject in an original and convincing way

Eviction

Ian Gibbins

Australia / 2023 / 0:11:39

"We have been ordered to leave. They told us our lease has expired. Their cast-offs litter our landscapes. We have our ways of keeping out of sight. These are our microrefugia..."
As human-induced global climate change threatens the viability of nearly every ecosystem on earth, small refuges, the microrefugia, may provide safe havens for the organisms that can successfully survive there. Small plants, fungi and species yet to evolve may yet be long-term survivors, if only we give them a chance... Nearly all of this footage was recorded in the Belair area of unceded Kaurna Land in South Australia. Much of it was filmed among the native plants in our own garden, with key elements recorded in Belair National Park. The music is in 11/4 time and includes samples of birds, frogs, machines, engines and alarms in and around the environments where the videos were recorded.

ITALIAN PREMIERE

JURY DECLARATION

For the way it weaves a story of forced displacement and fragile renewal through an evocative imagery of plant life. Traces of human presence – waste, detritus, absence – haunt the frames, linking personal and ecological loss in quiet, unsettling ways. Its powerful, political narration and visual textures deepen the poetic resonance, drawing viewers into a quiet yet urgent reflection on the intertwined fates of people and the natural world.

DIRECTOR STATEMENT

I really appreciate the Jurors’ comments: they clearly understood the film in the way that I intended, which is both reassuring and gratifying. In a time of so much environmental and social upheaval, giving voice to the voiceless seems more important than ever. Much of the footage for this video was recorded in my own garden and our local surroundings, yet it can address universal concerns about the effects of humans on endangered habitats. As artists and citizens, it is all too easy to despair. Nevertheless, as film makers, we can push forward with new ways of looking at the world that hopefully can inspire others to do likewise.

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

The Eggregores' Theory

Andrea Gatopoulos

Italy, 2024 / 0:16:00

He does not remember much from that time. Things have faded, like the color of a painting after too much light. The only thing that bothers him is this music. It keeps popping up... He thinks he has forgotten what it means. All he knows, for sure, is that he cannot get it out of his head.

JURY DECLARATION

For its meditation on the collapse of communication and the urgent question of how we might forge new languages to rebuild, following a rupture. It unfolds in haunting, etched black and white AI-generated imagery, illustrating a world unravelled by a pandemic where language itself becomes lethal. As words turn fatal – read, written, or spoken – the film layers this dystopia with a deeply personal tale of love, separation, and the lingering scars of COVID-era trauma.

SPECIAL MENTION

Your Dream is My Dream

Marina Sagona

United States / 2023 / 0:17:15

Your Dream is my Dream is a video about ancestral memory, shared identity and the collective unconscious.
According to C. G. Jung we are all born with common patterns and ancestral memories, that he calls archetypes, that are the exact same ones throughout lands and cultures. These memories and the collective unconscious manifest itself mainly through art and dreams, particularly reoccurring dreams, that with minimal variations are indeed the same for all of us.
We are all connected and somehow we all dream the same dreams.
The chorus of reoccurring dreams in Your Dream is My Dream can be traced back to four main categories - impossibility, unpreparedness, self-consciousness and loss.
Following a specific and different logic for each category, subtitles give additional body to the voices, both in Italian and in English.

JURY DECLARATION

For the collective tapestry the film presents, drifting through the dreams of the speaking subjects, revealing the strange familiarity of our subconscious lives. Recurring anxieties – lost teeth, missed cues, silent panic – form a that hints at the shared architecture of human psychology. The dynamic subtitles float and flicker over hazy imagery, blurring the line between thought and language and drawing attention to the difficulty to speak of this oneiric world.