Festival internacional Signos da Noite - Lisboa
International Festival Signs of the Night - Lisbon
 





8° Festival internacional Signos da Noite - Lisboa - Montijo - Novembro 5-10, 2024

22th International Festival Signs of the Night - Portugal

9





 
Montijo
Ateneu Popular do Montijo

5 Novembro
16 hs

 

Turbulence

Telemach Wiesinger
Germany / 2022 / 0:14:59

The film poem TURBULENCE stands in the field of tension between surreal fantasy and multi-layered reality.
Telemach Wiesinger's photographic recordings of aeroplanes from the perspective of the traveller encounter kinetic wing objects by the composer Alexander Grebtschenko.
In the congenial collaboration of the two artists, the electronically controllable "Chimera's" - elegant bird wings with megaphone - unfold expressive "acting" presence.
The dialogue between the sound level (Grebtschenko) and the visual level (analogue film workshop Wiesinger) opens up space for emotions, thoughts and interpretations.

PORTUGAL 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.

PORTUGAL PREMIERE


 

Negative / Positive Film

Film Negativo / Positivo
Federica Foglia
Italy / 2023 / 0:14:00

Negative/Positive Film is a hand-made, camera-less collage film composed of layers of erotic 16mm films from 1920s, 1940s and 1970s, intermingled with nature documentaries and layers of organic materials. This visual abstraction merges together both positive black-and-white film, and its negative black-and-white counterpart - on the same film base. This allows the film to exist in two versions, one positive and, the other negative. The artist once again uses the very delicate technique she has been perfecting over the past years of Emulsion Grafting, also known as Emulsion Lifting. The film is as an abstract remediation of female bodies dislodged from their original erotic context and, ripped away from their male co-protagonists. The man is removed from the picture, while the female body slowly merges with the body of insects and flowers at the crossroad between eco-criticism, decorative art, sculpture, and cubism. This unique film uses organic material, melted together with gelatine emulsion, first liquified then re-solidified, to produce a crystallized allegory of womanhood.

 

 

The Great Basin! Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Desert

Eric Weeks
United States / 2023 / 0:15:00

A film, book and print project that addresses climate change, the severe drought in the Western United States, gun culture, the military’s use of the basin and range of Nevada for atomic testing, cultural stereotypes, my own personal history, and my experiences in this mostly remote area. In the 15 minute short film I am creating complex collages of my still and motion captures made in Nevada with appropriated short clips from Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, recent weather footage, The Lone Ranger, as well as John Wayne’s and other historic films, cartoons, and many other cultural artifacts, in order to speak to the place and its significance.






 


Forests
Forêts
Simon Plouffe
Canada / 2022 / 0:16:22

Eastern white pines submerged under the waters of a hydroelectric reservoir on unceded Innu territory transform into flames. This exploration between water and fire illustrates our current climate emergency through multiple stories about the relationship between a community and it's land.
In a dark, ambiguous environment, minuscule particles drift slowly before the lens. The image focuses to reveal spruce trees and tall pines, while Innu voices tell us the story of this territory, this flooded forest. Muffled percussive sounds gradually become louder, suggesting the presence of a hydroelectric dam. The submerged trees gradually transform into firebrands as whispers bring back the stories of this forest.

 

Apoptosis

Antonio Arango Vázquez
Mexico / 2023 / 0:12:03

Apoptosis is a pathway of cell destruction or programmed cell death, and it's caused by the same organism. This happens when the cell is no longer needed or is damaged; we can say that the cell recognizes that "its time to die has come" and in this way stabilizes the functioning of the organism in which its habits.
Apoptosis is an audiovisual essay about the suicide.
This version is based on an interactive installation exhibited at the Centro Multimedia del Centro Nacional de las Artes (Mexico, 2022).
Some of the images shown are from several film frames captured from fictional films with the characters removed, leaving only the background. Excerpts from scenes where a suicide is shown on screen.