Internationales Festival Zeichen der Nacht - Berlin - International Festival Signs of the Night


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19th International Festival Signs of the Night - Berlin (7th Edition) / August 4-8, 2021

ONLINE EDITION
9

 




Berlin

August 7th, 2021 - 16 h -
August 9th, 2021 - 16 h

Online


 

Everything Is Under Control

Roland Denning
United Kingdom / 2020 / 0:06:25


Everything Is Under Control is a story told by a machine to humans in a world that has crashed and then been re-booted from a back-up. Unfortunately, the back-up was faulty and glitches are increasingly apparent. Have human beings and machines merged? Is the whole world counterfeit? Is free will an illusion? The machine is an unreliable narrator if ever there was one. It assures us that everything is under control, but can we believe it? Constructed during lockdown out of archive material and an AI synthesised voice, Everything Is Under Control is a wry philosophical reflection on our current predicament.

GERMAN PREMIERE




 

iOedipus

Trish McAdam
Ireland / 2020 / 0:08:04

This work by filmmaker Trish McAdam combines video, hand drawn animation and photography to create an immersive short inhabited by a mythological and historical Greek character to explore grief, sorrow, sacrifice and identity, so highly relevant to contemporary society. iOedipus is based on an aria of the electronic opera "iGirl" by the celebrated composer Roger Doyle with a libretto by renowned playwright Marina Carr, sung by counter tenor Morgan Crowley.

INTERNATIONAL PREMIERE


 

Green Thoughts

William Hong-xiao Wei
United Kingdom / 2020 / 0:19:55

Somewhere in the world there is a remote island. The sea. Lush hills. The impenetrable forest. The constantly changing weather. In a lodge by the sea, a Chinese writer immersing herself in reading and writing encounters a Japanese girl who is in a melancholic mood. "Have you ever seen something after its disappearance?" the girl asks. "Where are we right now?" the writer asks. "Somewhere in the past," the girl answers. Night after night some dreams lull them into sleep, but a heavy heart is lost in deep thoughts. What has actually happened and what the two girls are feeling, imagining or remembering starts to overlap. Is the scene of the outer world also becoming the self's inner world?

GERMAN PREMIERE


 

Raised from the Ground

Levantado do Chão
Melissa Dullius, Gustavo Jahn
Germany / 2019 / 0:11:11

Then he wakes up thinking he's woken up from a dream and thinks he's fallen asleep... He wakes up late and realizes that it's already dark and feels very sleepy.

BERLIN PREMIERE

 

 





The Fourfold

Alisi Telengut
Canada / 2020 / 0:07:13

Based on the ancient shamanic rituals and animistic beliefs in Mongolia and Siberia, an exploration of the indigenous worldview and wisdom. With hand-crafted imagery, a testament of reclaiming animism for planetary health and non-human materialities.

BERLIN PREMIERE




 

Scotland

Helena Pellicer
Spain / 2020 / 0:10:30

According to the legend, an Egyptian princess named Scota arrived by boat to the coasts of Scotland in the company of her husband, Goidel Glas, carrying with her the Stone of Scone that had belonged to the patriarch Jacob.

EUROPEN PREMIERE




 

Notturno

Giulio Petteno
Switzerland / 2019 / 0:19:43

A long night waiting to rediscover yourself before the day arrives, meeting different people. A reflection on the mixed feelings and emotions that follow each other when everything is still to be decided.

EUROPEAN PREMIERE



 

Where Have You Been?

Andrew Gillman
United Kingdom / 2021 / 0:10:30

Why did she go out on a night like this? One of the ambitions for the visual image of this film was to strive to exploit the defects of the mobile phone camera. We wanted to replicat the defects and imprecision of human imagination; to force the camera to capture images so degraded – whether out of focus, struggling for exposure, or imprecise – that it creates rather than captures images that would normally not exist; to support the thought "I can just about make out real shapes of things that become other things in the darkness".

WORLD PREMIERE

 

 

Goya

Roman Ermolaev
Netherlands /2020 / 0:09:18

Goya is a memory (re) collection story. In a dream like , cinematic style video, the journey of an anonymous character is unrevealing in parallel with the attempt of finding the genesis of the journey itself. This work chronicles the passage of the hero in search of the equilibrium ones usually striving for after the great loss. By relocating yourself from one landscape to another, heading towards the destination your gaze lead you into, one is not only reaching a point of desire but renouncing the foundation of the despair. The hopelessness which was engendered by the loss, by the death of clear guidance. The empty landscape turned into the matrix of a desolated road one still has to cross. The character steps into the ground wearing the foreign legs, carrying her through the sterile black and white locations. The ritual of walk in her case works as a mystical reverence towards the abandoned land. The land not carrying any meaning apart of the cry coming from the tree she is looking for.

GERMAN PREMIERE


 

Pandemic

Albert Bayona
Spain / 2021 / 0:07:00

Reading the novel Essay on Blindness by José Saramago captivated me from the beginning due to the parallelism with John Wyndham's novel The Day of the Triffids. Both works touch on the subject of a pandemic. On the one hand, Saramago writes about a pandemic that infects people with vision loss. On the other hand in the work of John Wyndham the pandemic is caused by the Triffids, hybrids between plants and animals, apparently produced in Soviet laboratories that have the autonomy to be able to move freely infecting at a high speed. Unlike this last work of science fiction of the early fifties, Saramago's novel does not specify the cause or origin of the plague and focuses only on the personal and group existence of characters without names, increasingly amplifying the intrigue and timelessness of events. Released in 1995, it was adapted into a film with the same title in 2008. For the work of John Wyndham, two adaptations were made, one for a film in 1962, directed by Steven Sekely and Freddie Francis, and another in 1981 for a BBC television series in which the blindness of the humanity was caused by a rain of meteorites.
My remix belongs to this adaptation. There is a third adaptation of the TV Triffids in 2009. For the rest of the footage I opted for Wolf Rilla's 1960 film Village of the Damned, also an adaptation of John Wyndham's novel The Midwich Cuckoos. Despite the difference between this two films and despite not having been captivated by these films, I was interested in their elegant black and white scenes with a small camera traveling and filming the extras on the floor, which I then transformed by dyeing the scenes in blue and red. From John Carpenter's remake of Village of the Damned, I recovered some scenes and small shots that I then later digitally modified. Finally, in the final part I used scenes from the movie Blindness.



WORLD PREMIERE