21e Festival international Signes de Nuit - Paris / 29 Septembre - 8 Octobre 2023
9
|
|
WARDSM AWARDS
The Goddess of Potong Pasir |
|
Sze-Wei Chan |
Singapore / 2023 / 0:07:57 |
This film is an intimate portrait of a mother’s love for her young daughter, as she teaches her about women’s strength and independence via the manifestations of the goddess Durga-Kali. Their rituals are a celebration of beauty, strength, life and the impermanence of it all. We see a unique expression of faith and love across diverse traditions from North, South and East India., that meet uniquely in the Indian diaspora in Singapore.
|
|
|
Jury Declaration:
A declaration of love dedicated to a young girl and her mother, to the light in the dark, with the help of an elegant and tender initiation through the cult devoted to an Indian goddess in Singapore and a contemporary dance and a ritual music that become hallucinatory.
|
SIGNS AWARD
The Signs Award honors films, which treat an important subject in an original and convincing way
|
|
|
Federica Foglia |
Italy / 2023 / 0:14:00 |
Negative/Positive Film is a hand-made, camera-less collage film composed of layers of erotic 16mm films from 1920s, 1940s and 1970s, intermingled with nature documentaries and layers of organic materials. This visual abstraction merges together both positive black-and-white film, and its negative black-and-white counterpart - on the same film base. This allows the film to exist in two versions, one positive and, the other negative. The artist once again uses the very delicate technique she has been perfecting over the past years of Emulsion Grafting, also known as Emulsion Lifting. The film is as an abstract remediation of female bodies dislodged from their original erotic context and, ripped away from their male co-protagonists. The man is removed from the picture, while the female body slowly merges with the body of insects and flowers at the crossroad between eco-criticism, decorative art, sculpture, and cubism. This unique film uses organic material, melted together with gelatine emulsion, first liquified then re-solidified, to produce a crystallized allegory of womanhood.
|
|
|
Jury Declaration:
This film is “manufactured” according to a very complex hand-made system : collage of erotic films, mineral, animal and plant sequences mixed in a very dynamic editing supported by sounds of buzzing of insects. The filmmaker uses an intermittent technique of emulsion lifting and gelatine emulsion for her film in a positive and negative black and white giving an organic feel.
|
|
NIGHT AWARD
The Night Award honors films, which are able to balance ambiguity and complexity characterized by enigmatic mysteriousn
ss
and subtleness, which keeps mind and consideration moving
|
Ghosts in the Cloud Forest |
|
Karl Nussbaum |
United States / 2023 / 0:21:00 |
There are Ghosts in the Cloud Forest that suck the digital data out of humans to stay alive and to stay in the realm of memory. And there are also modern day Hungry ghosts who feed on the energy of political anger, racism and violence in our country. In return for the data of the living, these Ghosts from the Cloud Forest provide the spirituality of nature and the beauty of biology.
This film was shot in the sacred Huangshan Mountains of China.
|
|
|
Jury Declaration:
Ghosts in the cloud forests correspond perfectly to the definitions of the Night award because of its complexity and ambiguity in the way that the movie evokes the relation between human spirituality, nature, and modern digital technology. This film is a very mysterious and very beautiful alert about how we lose connection with the pure nature without even understanding.
|
|
Director Statement:
Thank you and Festival International Signes de Nuit for the Night Award! I am honored and so pleased that the jury recognized and understood my intentions with this film. That is very gratifying for me.
Regarding our digital future and AI, I feel science will really benefit; the world of art through AI will be interesting; but as we are all beginning to see, the world of AI and Deepfakes is going to cause real chaos in the world of politics. Some are calling it 'the death of truth'. Personally I think I will retreat to a world of nature - a world older than time. Until we destroy that too.... In the meantime, let's all be kinder to each other.
|
|
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.
|
The Great Basin! Or : How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Desert |
|
Eric Weeks |
United States / 2023 / 0:15:00 |
A film, book and print project that addresses climate change, the severe drought in the Western United States, gun culture, the military’s use of the basin and range of Nevada for atomic testing, cultural stereotypes, my own personal history, and my experiences in this mostly remote area. In the 15 minute short film I am creating complex collages of my still and motion captures made in Nevada with appropriated short clips from Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, recent weather footage, The Lone Ranger, as well as John Wayne’s and other historic films, cartoons, and many other cultural artifacts, in order to speak to the place and its significance.
|
|
|
Jury Declaration:
For the unique way in which the final editing of the film, through imaginative combinations of old and newer images of American cinema, television and advertising, captures the cruel, cynical and polemical perception and consciousness of the anthropotype that extended the United States to the West, as well as for the revealing emergence of its silenced memory and the hidden and open racism of the american soxiety and culture, we give the Edward Snowden Award to the film "The Great Basin or how i learn to stop worrying and love the desert".
|
|
Audiocopter and the Midnight Sun
|
|
Aaslaug Vaa |
Norway / 2029 / 0:12:40 |
Magic occurs when the Swedish film composers Sebastian Rubinstein Öberg and Magnus Jarlbo together with the young multi-artist Emelie Markgren present new instrumental inventions in an encounter with northern Norwegian nature. Together, the two composers have created music for nearly 100 films. Sebastian Rubinstein Öberg for directors such as Jan Troell. Magnus Jarlbo composed the music for the Berlinale winner "A Soap".
|
|
|
Jury Declaration:
For the composition of music and image that exemplarily permeates the entire film and for the minimal to no cinematic effects highlighting the story beyond the characters' positions and their integration into the environment, as well as for the dynamic introduction of the element of paradox in every aspect of the story, we award the Night Award to the film "Audiocopter and the midnight sun". We would also like to add that both the photography and cinematography, with the camera accompanying the movements of the bodies and the playing of the music in a particularly magical way, refer with their evocative visuality as an aesthetic whole to forms and images of surrealist painting, resulting in an aesthetically complete, technical and essentially cinematic result.
|
|
|
|
|