International Festival Signs of the Night - Bangkok lnternational Festival Signes de Nuit - Bangkok


HOME CONCEPT SUBMISSION ARCHIVE CONTACT LAURELS


11th International Festival Signes de Nuit - Bangkok - July 11-20, 2025

23th International Festival Signs of the Night - Thailand



Bangkok - The Spirit of Opening

The Festival Signs of the Night - The Spirit of Independence






MAIN AWARD




The Eggregores' Theory

Andrea Gatopoulos
Italy / 2024 / 0:16:00


He does not remember much from that time. Things have faded, like the color of a painting after too much light. The only thing that bothers him is this music. It keeps popping up... He thinks he has forgotten what it means. All he knows, for sure, is that he cannot get it out of his head.

THAILAND PREMIERE


 

JURY DECLARATION

There would be no other movies like "The Eggregores' Theory" for quite some time in the near future. It would be hard to define which category it should belong to: a live-action painting, a still version of animation, an introduction to an impressionistic kind of nouveau art school narrated in a postmodern style, or a dystopian sci-fi film set in not-so-long-ago contemporary history. Andrea Gatopoulos has successfully proven that, at least somehow, these binary extremes can coexist in harmony and implement a new language, much like in its own narrative.



SPECIAL MENTION



Transit

Telemach Wiesinger
Germany / 2025 / 0:14:43

TRANSIT is a 16mm film poem with a soundtrack by Martin Bergande, a visual journey across the borders of the EU to the edges of Europe with the aid of tangential force and the means of transport car, train, ship and aeroplane across the borders of the EU to the edges of Europe.

ASIA PREMIERE



 

JURY DECLARATION

Telemach Wiesinger took us on the road with glittering grains of 16mm. While floating above any simplistic narrative,description or definition, sensual transience becomes tangible during this journey, grounded upon precision and cinematic vision. Transit is a film poem with transitory nature and defiance. Immense but humble, contemplative yet haunting, this film was conceived both as a destination and a detour. Simultaneously, belongs to somewhere and nowhere: a transgression.




SIGNES AWARD


The Signs Award honors films, which treat an important subject in an original and convincing way



The Land at Night

Richard Tuohy
Australia / 2024 / 0:14:00


I used to find the dusk a very unsettling time, as though the approaching night was something to be feared. It was as if, once night fell you could not flee, and had to face unspecified consequences. Maybe the land remembers and the night will reveal what we might have done...

THAILAND PREMIERE

 

JURY DECLARATION

A free association for visual experiences version where darkness dominates the majority of the screen time, which prevents our sight but widely opens the door for our approach into an unlimited hyper-reality voyage. This is very much owing to Richard Peter Tuohy's uncompromising cinematography and masterful editing style, which proves that even blurry and unclear visions can be an indirect means for enlightenment and entertainment value.







MENTION FOR THE SIGNS AWARD


The Signs Award honors films, which treat an important subject in an original and convincing way



Emperica

Kris De Meester, Ron Chiers
Belgium / 2024 / 0:09:02


Against the backdrop of societal collapse, two powerful voices engage in a high-stakes debate over the future of humanity. Should mankind be placed under total control to safeguard its survival, or should they be granted the freedom to shape their own destiny, even if it means risking self-destruction?

THAILAND PREMIERE


 

JURY DECLARATION

The film effectively contrasts the debate between two AIs about the necessity to control humans with the performance of a real human. This contrast serves as the artists' statement that art has never been, is not, and will never be creatable by AI.




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



Ghosting Mother

Bernard Mescherowsky
Germany / 2025 / 0:16:00


In "Ghosting mother", personal mourning rituals and processes of scanning and development intertwine to create a search for traces in the manifestations of memory. Starting from the destroyed grave of my mother, a search begins for the remaining apparitions. A mourning ceremony, a movement of remembrance, attempts at resuscitation. ghosting mother works with methods of autofiction and deals with questions of grief and its ritualization in bourgeois catholic contexts in an experimental documentary form. The self-developed 16 mm film reflects in its own materiality and its damage the failed attempt to record what has been lost.

ASIA PREMIERE




 

JURY DECLARATION

Digging deep into the grave, as an attempt to develop or re-create what had already disappeared, Ghosting Mother becomes a mournful horror of ritualization and memory. Through self-developed 16mm, old photos and other archival materials, the filmmaker immersed himself into the darkness of a pitch-black night seeking for remaining memorabilia. Ghosting used to be an act of forgetting and distance, however the damage felt through the processed celluloid textures subverted that into an act of transformation, from being deceased and destroyed to a visible ghost. Ghosting as an act of remembrance.




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 moving



The Birds Choose the Cards

Basim Magdy
Switzerland / 2024 / 0:24:00

I had an idea for a new film, then a pandemic landed over our heads like a renegade meteorite. Two years later I started working on what was meant to be a film about sunsets and tourism and war. It ended up being about all that, but as the world kept sliding down the unimaginable, I started thinking of Socrates' allegory of the cave. In the meantime, I spent a night in Taipei looking for a fortune teller whose two tiny birds knew what couldn't be told otherwise. Everywhere I went offered a piece from a puzzle that the film wasn't intended to solve, Saint-Nazaire, New York, Malta, South East Australia. I remembered the night the invasion of Iraq started. I remembered standing in front of a window in the Sarajevo airport a few years ago, wondering why I had tears in my eyes. It was the moment I recognized the view from watching the news about the Siege of Sarajevo in my childhood. Eventually I went to film hordes of tourists with their phones pointed at a cannon in Malta. Once it was fired, the cheering and applauding felt endless. Two hours later I filmed the sunset in the same location. Nothing made sense but I knew either me or the birds I met around Melbourne had to say something about this ongoing horror. We both said it at the same time.

ASIA PREMIERE



 

JURY DECLARATION

An uncommon bedtime story, recounted in an absurdist style. This is only half of the movie's visual aspect, where its intertitles almost contradict the images. Even single lines of sentences are self-contradictory in a rational and logical sense. This goes against the traditional function of subtitles/intertitles, which are obligated to serve the narrative picture. Meanwhile, the represented pictures diminish their value, downgrading their significance to a subordinate factor, as reading the subtitles/intertitles is more interesting than the footage and excerpts. This contributes to an unusually bizarre and enriching cinematic experience.





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 moving



Mountain Roars

Pobwarat Maprasob, Chonchanok Thanatteepwong
Thailand / 2024 / 0:13:25


As mountains shift and echoes from explosions rumble in the distance, mysteries lie hidden in every corner of caves, streams, and trees. A mysterious light appears, as a young man and woman try to piece together the story of this place.




 

JURY DECLARATION

On the surface, Mountain Roars might seem like an experimental film just playing with nature. Vast mountainous areas, moving streams, sea waves, greenish trees and stalagmites within dark caves are present, but also well-layered mysteries. Echoed from diegetic rumbles and piercing sound alike, here the mountain roars, and resonated even further by imposed cinematic elements lurking at each turn. With the filmmakers’ unique gaze toward their chosen landscapes, these locations were not perceived merely as places but living organisms. There is a breathing body we journeyed within.



Competition Short Film, Cinema in Transgression, Documentary