23e Festival international Signes de Nuit - Paris / 4-12, 2025
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Agnieszka Chojnacka |
Poland / 2024 / 0:30:00 |
In a world without humans, a visitor finds himself exploring the remnants of Earth's culture. Polish museums become a mysterious land of conjecture and fantasy, where artworks gain new life after the end of mankind. Pathos, comedy and melancholy are present in equal measure. Constructivism wanders with romanticism to the to the rhythm of the opera "Twilight of the Gods".
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JURY DECLARATION :
With its refined script, breathtaking compositions, and orchestral soundtrack, the film traces the arrival —if not the atypical existence—of a strange visitor in a geometrical world. Through a marvellous voice-over performance and a poetic, meaningful narrative, we are drawn into the experience of this tender and melancholic alien, who invites us to reflect on our lives as human beings.
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SIGNS AWARD
The Signs Award honors films, which treat an important subject in an original and convincing way
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Rakan Mayasi |
Palestina / 2023 / 0:18:00 |
An Israeli family’s equilibrium gradually disintegrates as the mysterious sound of a key is heard in the door of their apartment every evening.
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JURY DECLARATION :
The jury highlighted a mise-en-scène that gives full power to what is left unsaid and to what is not, creating a pervasive sense of suspense. The director constructs a palpable anxiety through a refined interplay of light and shadow, as well as editing that alternates between close-ups of tense faces and wide shots of the apartment, now a prison. This tense aesthetic, where the source of the noise remains unseen, transforms the domestic space into a place of psychological unease and intimate questioning. The tension thus arises from the viewer's imagination, inviting them to interpret this sonic threat, making the film a subtle cinematic reflection on fear, memory, and perception.
This film revealed details of stressed life under the Israeli occupation that surprised the jury. The narrative device of a supernatural haunting was very effective in quickly ratchetting up the emotional tension. The occupation of Palestinian land has been devastating to Palestinians and this film powerfully dramatizes the mental health break downs and the corroded ethics that the occupiers have brought upon themselves. The Key treats an important subject in an original and convincing way.
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NIGHT AWARD
The Night Award honors 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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Chung Hong Iu |
United Kingdom, Hong Kong / 2024 / 0:19:05 |
I. 2014 He and she fell in love during the Umbrella Movement. The movement eventually faded, so did their relationship, just as the deep sense of helplessness throughout the city.
II. 2019 After his wife, K left, E began to drive getaway car for the young protesters, through which he started to understand K. He seemed to discover his past self and what he had missed, form those youngsters. The years following the occupy movement were filled with disappointment, until the protests broke out in 2019. Nothing could return to normal. But hopelessness was just an illusion.Through remembrance at this point, we affirm that we could emerge from the darkness, even when it seems impossible, and bring light to the current collective trauma. I hope this film could cheer up the Hongkongers.
The two independent stories seem unrelated. But by putting them together, it is just like “kind of” Kuleshov’s experiment. Arranging shots one after another creates new meanings. There are always some things that seem unrelated when viewed separately, but seem to have a context when put together.
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JURY DECLARATION :
A beguiling script, poetic image and sound discontinuities, and a unique special effect that blurr faces and settings, all create a masterful balancing of ambiguity and complexity characterized by the enigmatic mysteriousness and subtleness that this prize seeks to celebrate. The joy and struggle of a love relationship blended with activist reflections on the Umbrella Revolution in contemporary Hong Kong provide emotional specifics that expand into universal questions and truths; “All that is solid melts into air and man is at last compelled to face his real condition and his relations with his kind.” Sound, image treatment, pacing, threads of story and self-reflective references to the cinematic space, make Afterwards an important addition to the canon of film art.
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DIRECTOR STATEMENT:
I am deeply honoured to receive the Prix de Nuit. Afterwards, was made in 2024, marking the fifth anniversary of the 2019 protests and the tenth anniversary of the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. The stories themselves, however, were born much earlier, from two unfinished works I wrote before and during the 2019 movement, projects I once believed would never be completed. Years later, when things seemed to repeat themselves, I realised that although the film could no longer be produced as live action and could only be made using stock materials and AI, it was perhaps the right time to retell what was left unsaid, to commemorate the movements and, through remembering them, to reaffirm that we are still here.
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EDWARD SNOWDEN AWARD
The Edward Snowden Award honors films, which offer sensitive (mostly) unknown information, facts and phenomena of eminent importance, for which the festival wishes a wide proliferation in the future
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Exit Through the Cuckoo's Nest
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Nikola Ilic |
Switzerland / 2024 / 0:19:10 |
This personal short documentary tells the story of a soldier who never wanted to be one. His decision never to pull a trigger led to resistance and ultimately to military prison. Pretending to be mentally ill, he leaves the war zone and returns to Belgrade via the insane asylum. On the day NATO begins bombing the entire country.
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JURY DECLARATION :
The jury recognized a mise-en-scène in which editing and visual textures become vehicles for an intimate and collective memory. The film interweaves personal archives, news footage, and various types of video media in a staccato rhythm, creating a temporal mosaic that recreates the confusion and violence of an era. The variations in format, color, and image quality mimic the fractures in perception and memory in the face of the chaos of conflict. Through this rigorous and subjective formal approach, the work elevates a personal testimony into a universal cinematic meditation on the themes of refusal, survival, and the price of individual resistance against the war machine.
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Rúnar Rúnarsson |
Iceland, Sweden / 2024 / 0:20:00 |
The humanistic and poetic story of a fragile man trying to achieve a simple task where his main obstacle is within himself.
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JURY DECLARATION :
The film features stunning and mature storytelling, driven by a magnificent performance from an actor in a narrative about the despair, loneliness and often invisible suffering of today's world. With remarkable sensitivity, the director captures powerful and visually astonishing moments of this character's inner world, offering a deeply empathetic portrait of emotional complexity about the human condition.
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DIRECTOR STATEMENT:
We are extremely proud of the great group of people who made this film with us. On behalf of all of us, then I would like to thank the jury for this honor and the festival for making our Film accessible to the audience in Paris.
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Jan Fabris |
Slovenia / 2025 / 0:25:00 |
When the sound recordist realises that their TV report involving the country's most popular politician has been faked, he sets out to find the truth.
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JURY DECLARATION :
The jury praised the direction, which itself becomes an instrument of suspense and drama. The staccato editing and expressive use of lighting—chiaroscuro, the cold lights of the control rooms, harsh neon—visually sculpt the character's paranoia. Tight close-ups of faces capture every micro-emotion, every doubt and every moment of determination, plunging the viewer into the anguish of the revelation. This precise technical direction transforms a police investigation into media manipulation into a breathtaking sensory experience, where the truth is revealed through glances and shadows.
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DIRECTOR STATEMENT:
I would like to thank the international jury for this special mention. I am always very happy when the film is screened live - especially in Paris, since I adore its huge cultural and cinematic heritage. Every such award for Lev Berger means a lot to all the cast and crew.
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MENTION FOR THE SIGNS AWARD
The Signs Award honors films, which treat an important subject in an original and convincing way
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Martín Seeger |
Chile / 2024 / 0:19:00 |
Jean, a Haitian migrant in Chile, is admired everywhere he goes. His body represents all the classical values of the academy. However, in the anonymity of his existence, he is also a canon of marginality.
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JURY DECLARATION :
The jury is captivated by a mise-en-scène that uses the body as a visual and intellectual battleground. The director films with a direct, frontal aesthetic, alternating wide shots that isolate the character with sculptural close-ups of their silhouette. A sophisticated interplay of light and shadow, along with framing that plays with perspective, transforms each scene into a visual allegory. This approach creates a constant tension between formal beauty and social oppression, making the protagonist's body both an object of fascination and a mirror reflecting the injustices and indifference he endures. Through its precise and poignant cinematic language, the film thus constructs a powerful social satire on everyday racism and the quest for dignity.
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MENTION FOR THE SIGNS AWARD
The Signs Award honors films, which treat an important subject in an original and convincing way
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Lia Sáile |
Germany / 2025 / 0:13:37 |
"Scattered Sea" follows 17 performers spanning two generations from the MENA/Maghreb region and Europe as they trace gestures of relation across borders—within a world fractured by historical trauma, displacement, and the longing for belonging. Through a poetic language of Magical Realism, performance, and documentary, the film constructs speculative spaces for decolonial reflection and future-oriented imaginaries.
Filmed across Morocco, Malta, and Germany, the geopolitical triangle shaped by layered colonial legacies and contemporary frictions between Europe and the MENA region is reflected. Through minimal gestures and symbolic actions, the performers inscribe and unsettle space. Hybrid zones of proximity and distance unfold: ruins, gardens, and streets are roamed; symbols are traced and deconstructed; sand is scattered and shaped into ephemeral islands between continents. The search for remnants transforms into a speculative act of placing traces—daring fragile beginnings.
The work weaves together cultural memory, decolonial inquiry, and historiographic critique, offering counter-narratives that resist linear temporality and binary world orders. It opens hybrid spaces for the reimagining of social and aesthetic imaginaries attuned to plural futures.
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JURY DECLARATION :
The jury praises a film that invents a hybrid cinematic language to materialize multicultural thought. By blending documentary, magical realism, and performance, the film constructs visual spaces where the artists' symbolic gestures—shaping sand, inhabiting ruins—literally transform the frame. The use of contemplative wide shots, integrated visual effects, and a dreamlike aesthetic creates "hybrid zones" where geographical and historical boundaries dissolve. This fluid and inventive form, which rejects any linear narrative, makes cinema itself a space for collective creation, opening up, through image and gesture, a field of possibilities for reinventing imaginations and connections beyond the fractures of the world. |
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MENTION FOR THE NIGHT AWARD
The Night Award honors 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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Yuyan Wang |
France / 2024 / 0:24:00 |
Artificial moons are going to be launched into space to eliminate the difference between day and night. An elderly couple retreats into their apartment, isolated from nature and the outside world. They follow their daily routines lit by neon lights and digital devices. A voice that seems to come from nowhere is their constant companion. “Breathe in,” it says, “breathe out. Time is just a feeling. Everything will be okay.”
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JURY DECLARATION :
The Moon Also Rises helps define what a Night Award honored film is; It balances ambiguity and complexity characterized by enigmatic mysteriousness and subtleness. The characters in this film appear content in their comfortable, isolated spaces. They are entertained just enough, accompanied by soothing voices that come from nowhere, reassuring them that though a “radical change” is about to happen, “Time is just a feeling. Everything will be OK.” The film’s dark, mostly blue palette, slow pace and restrained muzak sound track, act on the viewer as the world it portrays acts on the characters. But unlike them, we are not lulled to sleep while wide awake. Something is terribly wrong here. The Moon Also Rises sounds a quiet, cool, shadowed premonition of where the human species may be drifting. As the disembodied voice invites in the first minute: “This project holds significant therapeutic potential.”
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MENTION FOR THE NIGHT AWARD
The Night Award honors 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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Miranda Pennell |
United Kingdom / 2024 / 0:09:48 |
Gaza, December 2023. A confrontation with a disturbing photograph on social media triggers questions about what it means to be an onlooker.
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JURY DECLARATION :
Abstract pixel squares in random array of brown, sienna, light tan. A cursor arrow meanders across the silent frame. Is it a color study? A sedate, formal, male, English accented voice calmly starts: “An open air pit has been dug.” Not a color study. The Night Award honors films which are able to balance ambiguity and complexity characterized by enigmatic mysteriousness and subtleness, which keeps mind and consideration moving. The arc of Man Number 4 is a slow reveal that guides the viewer from cold analysis of a digital photographic field to very real life and death, horror of what human beings are capable. We are moved from a flat mysterious surface to an exploding array of questions about photography, film, the viewed, the viewer and their connections and dislocations, one from the other. It also nudges us to consider surveillance societies, war crimes on prime time and shock and awe entertainment - from the comfort of our screening rooms. The last line of this important film is “You put some nice music on".
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