21e Festival international Signes de Nuit - Paris / 29 Septembre - 8 Octobre 2023
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WARDSM AWARDS
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Jean-Gabriel Périot |
France / 2022 / 0:12:45 |
Whaling has been around for centuries. It seems the fruit of man’s violence, destroying himself by destroying nature. Accompanying the rise of capitalism, the practice survives today, reflecting humans’ eternal destructiveness of nature and the creatures unable to resist them.
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Jury Declaration:
In "All Effort of Men" classical literary narrative meets the continuous struggle of human societies in an innovative and aesthetically convincing manner. The challenging parts of this film reveal our society's complete transformation into a "There-Is-No-Alternative" model of states, managing a totalitarian repression against people and nature in it’s entirety. The film using fragments of past films and special effects, refering to demonstrations and riots, remembering and expressed by ocean wild waves, an insightful commentary about the necessity of the fight against the real monster that covers the face of our lives and the planet, the authoritarian Leviathian body of absolute control towards our bodies and our lives.
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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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Ramazan Kilic |
Turkey / 2023 / 0:16:00 |
A little girl tries to put a smile back on her grandmother’s face after the disappearance of her television, her only window on the world.
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Jury Declaration:
The film confront the spectator with the very important issue of the cultural oppression of an entire community, forced to violent assimilation and silence.. The original imaginative style, as well as the minimalistic use of purely dramatic cinematographic language, reveals in a convincing way an underlying tension, the need of these people to express their identity. This identity is symbolically be declared through the final act-appeal from the granddaughter to her grandmother. The Community at least symbolically recreate itself in an improvised event, where their voiles finally are heard.
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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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Yvonne Zhang |
USA / 2022 / 0:22:00 |
By an isolated desert motel, a young girl digs up a rotting carcass. Later that night, something mysterious is unearthed in her mother.
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Jury Declaration:
In the film "Carrion", the invasion of horror in the form of uncanny images of decomposition and in the form of a strange man who invades a mother and her daughter one night, in an isolated motel in the middle of nowhere, offer a profound commentary on the very nature of life. The film suggests multiple layers of memory and its imprints along with mystery, which are present in every moment of normality. The transformations of laughter, sadness, trauma and loss, are turned into a lyrical and aesthetical event, a reflection on life and death ...and the experience of existence.
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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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Charel Fabry |
France / 2023 / 0:08:46 |
Nils has only one goal: to escape the authoritarianism of the world he lives in. Once he's off the radar of Big Brother, it won't be long before he's caught by the radar of Big Brother, he will only have a short time before he is caught up by the system. Amély, a security assistant hired by the government, has only one objective: to keep the dissidents like Nils under control. She will use different means to make the human respect in her instructions, but he will resist her and make her lose her footing.
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Jury Declaration:
"Air Leak" treats burning present issues by pointing out the overwhelming input of information in an integral network of mechanisms. The convincing cinematographic comment use patterns of a dystopian science fiction. The control of data, the global surveillance and quantification of human life, provokes an individual rebellion here, simultany giving place to a revolutionary contemplation about a possible escape from totalitarian mechanisms. “Air Leak” remembers the need of resistance against a possible future, where human existence have turned into a pure value of the Capital, a system based on and fulfilled with collected datas used for authoritarian domination of human bodies.
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Raining Grace or Thanks to the Rain
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Chryssa Florou |
France / 2023 / 0:10:00 |
On a rainy day, in a confessional, a woman unexpectedly closes an important chapter of her life.
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Jury Declaration:
The orgial script evokes ignored sentiments. An unexpected situation creates inhabitual dialogues about privacy, love, confidences and the difficulty to remain a couple in actual life. The unusual context allow to focus on love and the suffering after a trahison. With its excellent acting of complex emotional driftings the film evokes conscience about sentiments trauma, where the rain of consolation has a cleaning efficience. To aware pardon and unconditional love is a pearl for the heart.
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Thanasis Trouboukis |
Greece / 2022 / 0:16:33 |
As a mountainous village in Greece sinks under the lake, the memories of its inhabitants emerge from the water.
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Jury Declaration:
"Under the Lake" is a metaphoric and beautiful visual experience who shows the relation between human memory, human environment and roots, as a poetic conception of time and space. Inspired by a Tarkovskian cinematographic language we see floating houses in the water as an astonishing way to evoke our spiritual need for freedom.
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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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Karim Azimi |
Iran / 2023 / 0:13:20 |
Some immigrants by the sea are waiting for them to cross the sea. A young couple with other immigrants are going to the light of the world, but they have problems when their child is born. "Survivor" of human migration from dangerous sea borders, who risk their lives just to have a normal and free life. In 2022, more than 3,000 people have lost their lives at sea borders..
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Jury Declaration:
The center of this powerful film is the choice to sacrify a baby in circumstances of migrant’s survival, developped in its ethical aspects. "Survivor" focus on the protagonists expressiv faces surrounded by a beautiful but also damaging nature.
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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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PV Lehtinen |
Finland / 2022 / 0:14:59 |
A speechless story of a young boy in a skeleton costume and his father’s swimming trip to a lido. It seems like an ordinary trip until a strange woman with sunglasses joins the father at the pool.
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Jury Declaration:
Discovering sexuality by a child is not a new subject in cinema. But "Allas" is troubling because the movie shows through sensual black and white images concentrated on three main characters, how the young boy's feelings are uncertain confronting the strange, unknown, and seductive aspects of life. The movie has no dialogue, a convincing stratagem way to point out the unspeakable, the boy incapacity to find appropriate words for his experiences.
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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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Adam Abdallah |
Lebanon / 2022 / 0:21:00 |
A solitary man living in Lebanon in a dystopian atmosphere writes sentences on the walls of a destroyed museum after recieving a letter that contains the number of the block. A conversation over the walls starts between the man and an unkonwn painter. The man begins the search of the painter through the evolution of their artistic conversation and the oppressive state goes into an aggressive search of them.
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Jury Declaration:
This enigmatic film could be interpreted as pointing out the memory of a cultural past as base to create a new reality. Artistics acts and writing a tools to preserve liberty and to combat the oppressions of individual statements. The empty archetectural places are transformed into white pages for new possibilities. Beyond dialogs the undefined and strange atmosphere create a complicity with the main protagonist. Even without understanding his painted designs and letters on the walls, we are invited to be solidary with them.
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MENTION FOR THE 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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Tangbao Zhong |
United States / 2023 / 0:24:14 |
A philosophy professor keeps getting assignments from a dead student... Behind it all lies a puzzle of technology and thought.
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Jury Declaration:
"The Bone" offered a realistic captivating view on the problemetic how states direct the mondial evolution of neo-capitalistic societies, where technologies dominate and the death gets a tabou. Where human's civilisation is supposed to go? What is fake or true? Why are we confronted to become immortals or robots? A surprising film, where sciences finally create reality and its perception, a film where the real still seems science fiction, but isn’ t any more.
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MENTION FOR THE JURY AWARD
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Naz Caybasi |
Turkey / 2023 / 0:10:39 |
One day, a girl living in a village sees blood on her panties. She’s having menstruation, but she doesn't know what it is. She hesitates to ask someone and tries to discover on her own. She finally finds an answer, but that answer is only the part of the cycle she’s in.
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Jury Declaration:
"Cycle" proposes, in a very simple, realistic and minimalistic way, an objective point of view about the trauma of growing up as a woman in specific cultures. It's surprising how we can be close to an innocent young girl's face, understanding her feelings. In accordance with the shocking experience for the young character, the imagagery stays dark and gloomy.
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