International Festival Signs of the Night - Paris
Festival internatinal Signes de nuit - Paris
 

22e Festival international Signes de Nuit - Paris / 4-13 Octobre 2024
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Germany


Friday, October 11th, 2024 - 8 pm
Maison Heinrich Heine
Cité universitaire
75014 Paris


 

A Single Incident

Eine einzelne Tat

Constanze Wolpers
Germany / 2023 / 0:19:12


The 15 year old Yezidi Arkan Hussein Khalaf is stabbed to death in Celle in northern Germany. The police questions, interrogates, autopsies, searches, reconstructs, preserves, records - 1700 pages. An approach to structural racism via investigation files, football and growing up in Celle. The essayistic documentary reads the files and asks about their performativity: which terms find their way into the verdict, which get lost? It examines the imprints of those writing the narrative about the crime. Major football events from 1990 to 2014 serve as chroniclers of the formation of a German identity. It contrasts this with Arkan's family. How did they experience the night of the crime? Why is it clear to them that it was racism? The film dives through files, newspaper articles, archive material, images of small-town idylls and football matches. It explores the migration history of the Yezidi as so-called "Gastarbeiter" in Celle, forgotten right-wing attacks and the filmmaker's own growing up in Celle.

FRENCH PREMIERE


 

Does this apply to you?

Fühlst du dich angesprochen?
Evelyn Deller, Selena Knoop
Germany / 2023 / 0:18:48 26


In this nearly surreal Super 8 film, we combine lyrical text and autobiographical material to come to terms with our past traumatic relationships. It's about freeing ourselves, opening our mouths and speaking out about what we've experienced, what our relationships had in common and what so many other people also experience and the spirals they can't find their way out of for a long time.


INTERNATIONAL PREMIERE








 

Sapperlot - english

 

Werner Biedermann
Germany /2024 / 0:03:30


If film be an extract of Life – minus the boring parts in between – then the short film ’Sapperlot’ is the dreamlike quintessence of cinematography. Essential aspects of film reception are summarized in a sociological commentary by Dr. Gerhard Schäuble, while free-wheeling snippets of panoramic film footage combined with found footage excerpts illustrate the text in a kaleidoscopic manner. The variety of visual and acoustic impressions are elusive, as they are nourished by illogical hallucinatory memories of life and the awareness of secret, often suppressed, desire(s). *’Sapperlot’ doesn’t really correspond to any English exclamation, though several come close to it … think ’Good Lord!’, or, better still, think French, think ’Parbleu!’ – that comes closest.

FRENCH PREMIERE

 

Torii

 

Martin Gerigk
Germany / 2024 / 0:12:30


Torii is a short film in the form of an audiovisual composition about the traditional Shinto gates of the same name in Japan. The film uses these gates which symbolically mark the transition from the mundane to the sacred as representatives of a personal synaesthetic and spiritual journey through five levels of consciousness, traveling from existentialism to metaphysics, abstraction, and the Shinto deities called Kami, culminating in a final transition that weaves together these diverse philosophical threads.

FRENCH PREMIERE


 

Long Time no See

Lange nicht gesehen

Kevin Biele
2023 / Fiction / 0:21:10


Silvia returns to her office job at a pharmaceutical company after a long absence, only to find that she is no longer in the system.

PARIS PREMIERE









 

Slow Down The Fall

 

Camille Tricaud, Franziska Unger
Germany / 2023 / 0:19:52


In the light of the Alps, a great ski-jumping hill flashes metallically. Two ski jumpers synchronously rehearse movements in the valley, answer generic questions in front of a green screen and pose on the hill while being watched by a film crew. It is the first reunion for the two athletes since their separation.