This is a story about an orphan girl Alizava and her unfamiliar father, whose soul inhabits various things. In an abandoned mansion a childish ritual commences, erasing the line between the living and the dead. A silent dialogue between the girl and her father summons others. Who are they?

A filmmaker mourns the fading faces of his loved ones and evokes the ritual of masks as way of connecting to the afterlife

Jury Declaration:

The Signes Award goes to MASQUES by Olivier Smolders for its poetic ability to meditate on the timeless subject of human memory and loss. Oscillating between cinematic essay and disaster narrative, the film captures, in its most original way, the ambiguity of the human soul in the face of death. Elegiac and, at times, grotesque, the director navigates more than aptly the nuances of a sensitive topic in his very natural stream-of-consciousness narration, which renders perfectly the masks as his ultimate thread of rationality to ponder on the incongruity of human existence

An unknown force pushes a man to a place of extraordinary characteristics in the high Arctic. In its limits, is where he may find the answer. Between an introspective adventure and the poetry of the absurd.

Jury Declaration:

The Night Award goes to USELESS OPERA SINGERS for its digressive and discontinuous structure that carries us along this lifelong existential questioning about the human condition in today's society. In a world where everything needs to be calculated, explained, touched, this film uses the absurd to contrast with our logical mind and gets us to ask ourselves about what makes really sense. Through its playful dialogue this piece denounces the crisis of the modern world.