Festival internacional Signos da Noite - Lisboa |
International Festival Signs of the Night - Lisbon |
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9° Festival internacional Signos da Noite - Lisboa / Outubro 6-12, 2025
23th International Festival Signs of the Night - Portugal
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THGEME / TEMA
JAPAN :
DEATH - RITUAL _ DANCE - LIFE
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Desterro
Calçada do Desterro 7
1150-241 Lisboa, Portugal
7 Outubro 2025
00.30 hs (night 7-8 outubro) |
All films are accesible by orgininal languages and English subtitles
DIRECTOR BIOGRAPHY
Alisa Berger was born 1987 in Makhachkala (Republic of Dagestan, Russia) and raised in Lviv (Ukraine) and Essen (Germany). Her roots are Korean (Koryo-Saram/Koryo-In) and Jewish (Galicia/Ukraine).
She studied film and fine arts at the Academy of Media Art Cologne (KHM) and at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia Bogotá. With her 2017 KHM diploma film, she was nominated for the Max Ophüls Prize and for the FIRST STEPS Award of the Deutsche Filmakademie. She was also the recipient of the Best Film Award for New Directors at Int. Film Festival Uruguay and the Screenplay Award of H.W. Geißendörfer. 2018 - 2022 she lived in Tokyo and studied Butoh. Currently she is at Le Fresnoy - Studio national des arts contemporains (FR).
Her work often deals with a search for the spiritual, non-rational drive in our world, cultures whose practices of knowledge acquisition are related to religious ideologies, mortuary cults or futuristic concepts of these believes. |
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DIRECTOR STATEMENT
The film INVISIBLE PEOPLE, masquerading as a portrayal of Butoh dance, instead delves into the hidden: invisible bodies, people and gestures. Through personal experiences and the loss of my father, it navigates these intangible spaces, using Butoh as a lens. It explores the not-automatic-life that exists in transitions, in the magic of encountering these invisible moments.
The butoh dancers and their journey serve as a channel for the viewer to enter this thought process. Rejecting traditional explanations, the film humanizes the dancers and their emotional stories, steering away from historical or technical details, as other Butoh documentaries usually do. The film demystifies the practices of the dancers, it is not about the "darkness" or the "healing" of butoh. It is about being peripheral, invisible, and an outsider, being alive.
I tried to create a trancelike film experience, a connection between the viewer and the film, that allows the viewer to feel their own slipping into invisibility and into a world of shapes. The film's mosaic-like structure hopefully connects us to the transformative moment between existence and death. |
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Alisa Berger |
Germany / 2024 / 1:11:22 |
Invisible People is a multi-layered depiction of the unique Japanese contemporary dance Butoh that flows between revolt, eroticism, trance, prayer, ancestral experience, and physical anonymity. The film gradually drifts away from its core issue and becomes a general portrayal of life itself, with all its unforeseen strokes of fate and strange micro-connections.
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