18e Festival international Signes de Nuit - Paris - October 1-5 / 22-25, 2020
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CINEMA IN TRANSGRESSUIN SECTION
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Alyona Larionova |
United Kingdom / 2018 / 0:14:05 |
A hybrid documentary film that follows a Kazakh berkutchi (eagle-hunter) on his journey to tame his wild eagle, Sadak. The film draws upon the unique bond between the hunter and his eagle to provide a meditation on power relations in a world dealing with security crisis and accelerating hyperconnectivity. Oscillating between states of control and submission, berkutchi, Sadak, a judoist, and a border control officer, offer viewers their own bodily interpretations of the constantly shifting power scales.
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Jury Statement:
The Main Award in the Transgression section goes to Alyona Larionova for the compelling intelligent approach to storytelling, questioning the means of narrative structures. Her tactile meditation upon control and dependency is mostly relevant in the context of a Global pandemic with all its injustices. As societies have grown more accustomed to virtual connectivity her observations on language and technology bring new aspects into viewer’s attention. New ways of generating content and meaning capture our attention.
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Philip Rabalais |
USA / 2019 / 0:10:35 |
Earth FM is a minimalist sci-fi about imaginary science and sonic symbiosis. Three researchers reach into the planet using esoteric audio equipment. Their search for signal culminates when their transmissions cross, resulting in a mysterious and cathartic discovery.
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Jury Statement:
Special Mention for "Earth FM" attributed to Philip Rabalais for great sound design and the usage of radio waves in experimental filmmaking. These strange sounds become the music of the Earth. |
SIGNS AWARD
The Signs Award honours films, which treat an important subject in an original and convincing way
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Phoebe Barran, Lliana Bird |
United Kingdom / 2019 / 0:13:30 |
Behind every photo is a story, a moment captured, a snapshot in time... "Snapshots" tells three unique stories through the voyeuristic lens of a photo booth camera. Although their circumstances and motivations are very different, each character shares a desperation that’s led them to their booth: a heartbroken transvestite driven to conforming to societal expectations; two young people compelled to risk everything in the hope of a better life; and a lonesome cleaner who goes to extraordinary lengths to attract the attention he so desperately craves. With the help of the camera each character uses deception in pursuit of happiness, demonstrating that appearances are not always as they seem.
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Jury Statement:
For using the camera creatively as a penetrating eye into the human behaviour through which fantasies, dreams and pains can be watched as opposed to appearances that are not always as they seem to be.
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SPECIAL MENTION FOR THE SIGNS AWARD
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Shir Handelsman |
Israel / 2019 / 0:05:00 |
An opera singer stands on a lifting platform reaching to the sky and sings a Martyr's wish for redemption. His fantasy spectacle creates a counterpoint between human voice and mechanical sounds of other platforms moving in space. The music, taken from one of J.S Bach's cantatas, is the Recitative Movement which describes the ascension of Christ and expresses the desire to become one with god.
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Jury Statement:
This award is given to ‘’Recitative’’ for having conveyed a very sharp and direct message with a power that enables the observer to question spirituality versus materialism.
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NIGHT AWARD
The Night Award honours films, which are able to balance ambiguity and complexity characterised by enigmatic mysteriousness and subtleness, which keeps mind and consideration moving
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Hiroya Sakurai |
Japan / 2019 / 0:06:53 |
In the man-made waterways of rice paddies, the water in nature must follow artificial rules. In that way, nature is made abstract, giving rise to a new form of beauty distinct from the natural state. The theme of this work is the liveliness of water as it follows the man-made course. This work is a ballet using the sound and the movement of the algae and water. With the waterway as the theater, I filmed the choreography of the algae that flows in the water. In episode 10 of The Stream, I tried an experiment in which environmental sound in the water is replaced with environmental sound from outside the waterway. As a result, the viewer experiences the sound of the wind as an underwater environmental sound. The wind moves the aquatic plants and pushes along objects floating on the water.My purpose was to use the expression of the wind as a metaphor for the stream and to impress the viewer with the liveliness of water, which is the theme of this work.
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Jury Statement:
The farming process never had been easy. It is tiring and causes suffering. The film delivers human efforts to control nature, for example to grow like rice, but the camera shows us that nature will not be completely controlled. Images of the underwater show algae are moving freely and spread out beautifully, taking over and the limits of man made canalizations. This power images observing nature quietly without humans, turns the rice field into an extraordinary scenery. |
SPECIAL MENTION FOR THE NIGHT AWARD
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Beatrice Aliné |
Germany / 2019 / 0:10:00 |
You can measure the light but you can’t measure the dark. In duality we see one as the opposite of the other. Yet darkness is the absence of light. And an absence is not a measurable thing. It simply does not exist. Light protects us from our fundamental fear of the dark. But remember where there is light, there must be shadow. We live in a technological era where our dependence on energy is greater than ever before. It became an irreplaceable commodity. So one question arises quickly. What's left to do if the sun pulls the plug on you? The answer lies within the perception of the viewer.
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Jury Statement:
Special Mention for the Night Award for "Absence of Light" for the use of observational documentary images with fictional montage. The perception of dark is related to the absence of the light, and that represents the driven narrative of a scientific observation on the solar system, energy and light.
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Luis Carlos Rodriguez |
Spain / 2020 / 0:06:00 |
The audiovisual language was born, grew and developed from artistic activity. Audiovisual language is and will be an artistic process that evolves from art and the hand of an artist in its two main channels: experimental cinema and video art. We firmly believe that audiovisual language must continue to evolve from experimentation and artistic activity. We firmly believe that all creation is always a recreation. The public domain allows us to recreate and recount, again manipulating the time and space of the sequences, (especially those that became unforgettable for us at some point), and, from an audiovisual economy / ecology, move forward with new proposals in this constant process of evolution that must be the audiovisual language..
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Jury Statement:
“Collage 25” is based on shots of the original plot in the horror movie “Carnival of Souls” (1962). It presents a re-cut, condensed, reduced, focused and expanded version to recreate a panic syndrome, endlessly loped. The overlapping transforms the fright becoming eternal. The cinema technique of reconstruction can fade stories down to an emotionally powerful endless fear.
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