Internationales Festival Zeichen der Nacht - Berlin - International Festival Signs of the Night |
|
10. Internationales Festival Zeichen der Nacht / Berlin Edition
23th International Festival Signs of the Night / Worldwide
November 11 - 16, 2025
Kino & Bar in der Königsstadt - - - Straßburger Straße 55 - - - 10405 Berlin (Prenzelberg) |
|
|
|
Sinan Taner |
Switzerland / 2024 / 0:18:14 |
An elementary school sports day gets out of hand. A harmless argument between two children ends in death threats between the two fathers. The collective overload shakes an entire society and unfolds into a microcosm of chaos.
|
|
|
JURY DECLARATION
It is with great pleasure that we award our main prize to 1:10 by Sinan Taner. This is a film that stays with us—a disturbing mirror of our times, which, with formal rigor and narrative intelligence, shows how quickly the seemingly harmless can tip over into the existential. The consistent bird's-eye view becomes a narrative principle: it allows us to look down on the hustle and bustle of a school festival as if it were a social experiment in which a harmless children's quarrel throws an entire community off balance. In this, it is all too easy to draw parallels with current world politics.
|
SIGNS AWARD
The Signs Award honors films, which treat an important subject in an original and convincing way
|
|
Domingo familiar |
Gerardo Del Razo |
Mexico / 2024 / 0:17:59 |
In a peripheral zone of Mexico City, the collection of money from merchants and residents of the area is an everyday occurrence. On a sunny Sunday, in a housing unit located in one of these areas, a merchant has not paid his fee and the hired killers have come to give him an ultimatum.
|
|
|
JURY DECLARATION
We present the Signs Award to Family Sunday by Gerardo Del Razo – a courageous film that takes a clear stance against the mafia and corruption. The formal decision to stage the film as a single shot in continuous long-shot is more than a technical masterpiece. It becomes a political statement: viewers observe the events from a certain distance, becoming witnesses to an everyday act of violence that is repeated daily in countless neighborhoods across Mexico. Del Razo forces us to look, gives a voice to the nameless, and shows that resistance is possible.
|
NIGHT AWARD
*
The Night Award honors films, which are able to balance ambiguity and complexity characterized by enigmatic mysteriousness and subtleness,
which keeps mind and consideration moving
|
|
|
Adrian Flury |
Switzerland / 2024 / 0:28:00 |
Drifting through videoclips online easily leaves you distracted, lost, and back on square one. Imagine, you found a series clips organized by a sense of inchoate feeling of eclipse of time and end of the world, evoking a shared sense
of fate...
|
|
|
JURY DECLARATION
Our Night Award goes to Panic in Nowhere by Adrian Flury. Flury assembles an amusing and disturbing collage of our times from found online material. What initially appears to be aimless drifting through video clips condenses into a disturbing overall picture: a society caught in the hamster wheel of higher, further, and faster. Through outstanding editing and dramaturgy, Flury shows what it seems to mean to be human in today's world. Panic in Nowhere is an important film. A film that hurts because it diagnoses so precisely.
|
EDWARD SNOWDEN AWARD
*
The Edward Snowden Award honors films, which offer sensitive (mostly) unknown informations, facts and phenomenons of eminent importance, for which the festival wishes a wide proliferation in the future
|
Places I´ve called My Own
|
|
Sushma Khadepaun |
France, Inde / 2024 / 0:28:00 |
Tara returns to India for her father funeral. There she finds a mother denial about her sexual orientation and the shadow of the paterfamilia still hanging over the household.
|
|
|
JURY DECLARATION
The queer protagonist is in the middle of in vitro fertilization treatment when she returns to India to attend her father's funeral and visit her mother. Sushma Khadepaun tells a sensitive story about the difficulties to break free from preconceived female role clichés and society's expectations - there is no room for romantic love between women in India: the protagonist’s former lesbian girlfriend is now married and has a child. In a dream sequence, the magical world of possibilities opens up to our protagonist. A courageous empowering film for women. As every societal change starts with an idea. Or a dream that makes you smile.
|
Exit Through the Cuckoo's Nest
|
|
Nikola Ilic |
Switzerland / 2024 / 0:19:10 |
This personal short documentary tells the story of a soldier who never wanted to be one. His decision never to pull a trigger led to resistance and ultimately to military prison. Pretending to be mentally ill, he leaves the war zone and returns to Belgrade via the insane asylum. On the day NATO begins bombing the entire country.
|
|
|
JURY DECLARATION
As an individual testament to the war in former Yugoslavia, the voice-over and videos form a very personal Serbian point of view, serving as a convenient and soothing memory manipulation of a traumatic time, in recollection and lament. More than this it captures a particular troublesome period of history with personal reflections in both rhetoric and images. Every soldier has a story to tell and this one is the treatment of a contentious objector as he pays the price of his resistance at the hands of prosecutors and later through self-torment following the consequence of his decisions.
|
|
|
Rúnar Rúnarsson |
Iceland, Sweden / 2024 / 0:20:00 |
The humanistic and poetic story of a fragile man trying to achieve a simple task where his main obstacle is within himself.
| |
|
JURY DECLARATION
In just 20 minutes Rúnar Rúnarsson´s film O manages to paint a touching, deeply honest and painful portrait of a man who has succumbed to his alcohol addiction. The visual decision to use black and white heightens the protagonist's inner turmoil to an unbearable degree; as viewers, we feel his despair until the last bottle is emptied. Alcoholism portrayed unvarnished and wonderfully intimately—a film that is not only artistically compelling, but could also be used for prevention purposes.
|
|
|
Chien Han Lai |
United Kingdom / 2025 / 0:14:59 |
Hsiao Le tries to reconcile with her friend by inviting her to fulfill their old promise to set off fireworks at the summit of a mountain. Through their conversation, she realizes that the changes in their lives are irretrievable, forcing her to confront the reality of their altered relationship.
| |
|
JURY DECLARATION
This account of a bitter-sweet reunion is a worthwhile, even original, take on the basic scenario of lost friendship. As people change with time, along with their plans, outlook and attitudes, long-term friendships can suffer as a result. Director Chien Han Lai manages to delicately balance this premise finely and realistically while also conveying charm and sensitivity in the emotional investment humans give and are subsequently demoralized by when not receiving it in return.
|
MENTION FOR THE SIGNS AWARD
The Signs Award honors films, which treat an important subject in an original and convincing way
|
|
El canon |
Martín Seeger |
Chile / 2024 / 0:19:00 |
Jean, a Haitian migrant in Chile, is admired everywhere he goes. His body represents all the classical values of the academy. However, in the anonymity of his existence, he is also a canon of marginality.
|
|
|
JURY DECLARATION
El canon by Martín Seger begins seemingly innocently and surprises the audience until the very last minute. A black body is exploited—as a worker, as an aesthetic object, for medical research purposes—and even after death, the skeleton serves as an object of observation. The person behind the object—their feelings, their pain, their identity—are not only ignored, but deliberately obscured. A relentless film about racism, whose poetry and beauty also make us viewers silent, accepting accomplices.
|
MENTION FOR THE SIGNS AWARD
The Signs Award honors films, which treat an important subject in an original and convincing way
|
|
|
Damian Walshe-Howling |
Australia / 2023 / 0:20:54 |
1979. As volatile protests break out across the city of Sydney, Croatian born Marina is forced to expose a secretive love affair with her Australian boyfriend, as an escalating political storm spills into her childhood home with devastating consequences.
|
|
|
JURY DECLARATION
Institutional xenophobia and prejudice soon rise to the surface in a so-called white liberal society. Despite the majority of this gradually tense 1979-set political drama only taking place in interiors places, it nonetheless replicates the era very well. Furthermore, it also highlights how political corruption and brutality were not only found in places such as China, Iran and Russia. Also brought to the surface are the lengths to which so-called respectable parents will go for the benefit of politicians. In this case it is to expose the family of his son’s Croatian immigrant girlfriend, a family that must have hoped moving to Australia would make them feel less oppressed.
|
MENTION FOR THE NIGHT AWARD
The Night Award honors films, which are able to balance ambiguity and complexity characterized by enigmatic mysteriousness and subtleness,
which keeps mind and consideration movingcing way
|
|
|
Agnieszka Chojnacka |
Poland / 2024 / 0:30:00 |
In a world without humans, a visitor finds himself exploring the remnants of Earth's culture. Polish museums become a mysterious land of conjecture and fantasy, where artworks gain new life after the end of mankind. Pathos, comedy and melancholy are present in equal measure. Constructivism wanders with romanticism to the to the rhythm of the opera "Twilight of the Gods".
| |
|
JURY DECLARATION
Deserving a Night Mention is the story of a sole visitor to earth, long after humans have disappeared. Despite that, everything seems intact, as if earthlings have only gone away for the weekend and this also looks the case when the visitor enters a well-preserved art gallery in Poland. In its spoken impressions, the visitor develops animal-like sensitivity and human emotions. As a result, the film becomes humorous yet poignantly melancholy, underlining the fact that one day humans will be gone in the same way that dinosaurs and other creatures were millions of years ago. Also highly commended is in how the film conspicuously balances editing and narrative pacing over its thirty-minute length, not least in the choice of musical soundtrack.
|
MENTION FOR THE NIGHT AWARD
The Night Award honors films, which are able to balance ambiguity and complexity characterized by enigmatic mysteriousness and subtleness,
which keeps mind and consideration movingcing way
|
|
|
Rakan Mayasi |
Palestine / 2023 / 0:18:00 |
An Israeli family’s equilibrium gradually disintegrates as the mysterious sound of a key is heard in the door of their apartment every evening.
| |
|
JURY DECLARATION
Fear of The Key is the invisible and intangible antagonist of an Israeli family. And like a virus, the fear spreads from the daughter to the parents, and ultimately to the treating physician. However, sedatives do not alleviate the fear, leaving only the option of resorting to violence. But the shots ring out into the void. With The Key, Rakan Mayasi opens up a (narrative) space in which geopolitical questions are not answered, but dialogue is invited. Fear alone only escalates to more violence. A courageous masterpiece and not only a metaphor, keeping our minds moving long after the final sentence of the film.
|
|
|
|
