Internationales Festival Zeichen der Nacht - Berlin - International Festival Signs of the Night |
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11. Internationales Festival Zeichen der Nacht / Berlin Edition
24th International Festival Signs of the Night / Worldwide
June 9 - 14, 2026
Kino & Bar in der Königstadt - - - Straßburger Straße 55 - - - 10405 Berlin (Prenzelberg) |
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Cesare Bedogne |
Italy / 2024 / 1:04:59 |
An actress leaves for a journey together with a film-maker, TS Eliot's The Waste Land and a deck of Tarots. The omens look gloomy but she attempts to defy them through the very film they are shooting, improvising day by day, and little by little the frames start playing the role of cards in a cinematic deck of Tarots. At the end the response will be a new one, perhaps even more sibilline, her own.
In October 2025 Eight of Wands won the Best Camera Award at the 26th Mediteran Film Festival, with the following motivation by the Jury: "The camera, with its calmness, precision, and sensitivity, creates a deep visual and emotional experience. This film is characterized by exceptional subtlety and a sense for the visual rhythm of nature and human presence. Calm, precisely composed frames build a poetic space in which every movement of water, drops, or light, becomes the bearer of an inner state. Black and white and color scenes intertwine in gentle balance, while reflections on water and glass create a sense of duality – a world that simultaneously exists and disappears. Everything in this film pulsates with a quiet strength – between the real and the imagined, between movement and stillness".
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JURY DECLARATION
The jury gives the Main Award to "Eight of Wands" for its exceptional visual precision and its ability to turn landscape, movement, and time into a deeply cinematic experience. The film creates a poetic space where image and inner state become inseparable. Its visual language explores questions of memory and time through rhythm, movement and observation rather than explanation, achieving a rare sense of universality. It's a meditation of human existence on how to continue moving forward when certainty, meaning and direction have been lost.
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DIRECTOR STATEMENT
As other works we made together, "Eight of Wands" is a film conceived, dreamt and improvised with actress Maria Frepoli. Even though she didn't want to sign it, I consider it as belonging to both of us on equal terms. We lived it together. The film unfolded almost by itself as we were travelling and shooting, day by day, as a sort of physical and spiritual road movie, following its own enigmatic way. Both in life and in art: dream and reality, memory and direct experience recorded by the camera were incessantly merging and reflecting into one another. Throughout the film it was very important for us to have a totally spontaneous response to existence: for instance, the three actions performed behind the red curtain by Maria toward the end of the film, responding existentially and artistically to the Tarot cards picked at the beginning, were improvised on the spot. They simply felt necessary, their consequences unpredictable. John Cage said once that an experimental action is one the outcome of which is not foreseen.
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SIGNS AWARD
The Signs Award honors films, which treat an important subject in an original and convincing way
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William Hong-xiao Wie |
France, Spain, United Kingdom / 2025 / 0:30:00 |
An essay film that adopts a lyrical and distinctly queering approach to sexual identity, social dynamics, and everyday life in contemporary China. Through the psychoanalytic and introspective voiceover of a young post-pandemic Chinese migrant in Europe, the film interweaves her private memories of intimacy with public narratives of resistance. As her reflections unfold, she and her community navigate secrecy, repression, survival, looming precarity, and displacement, confronting the personal cost of existing in the current age of turbulence and regression, in a world that demands their silence.
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JURY DECLARATION
The Signs Award goes to "Elegy for the Lost" for treating questions of queer identity, migration, repression and memory in an original and convincing way. The film transforms the personal reflection of young Chinese women into a broader meditation on survival, silence, and the cost of existing under social and political pressure, while giving presence to people and experiences that risk disappearing from memory or being pushed to the margins of history.
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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
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Vikki Bardot |
| Turkey / 2025 / 0:08:22 |
"Dreamt by Another" is an allegorical take on creating with artificial intelligence and a meditation on identity, memory, and love. Interweaving passages from Pinocchio (1883), The Velveteen Rabbit (1922), Frankenstein (1818), and Borges's The Circular Ruins (1940), the film builds a single narrative about coming into existence. It extends the lineage of wooden puppets, toys, and monsters into the realm of artificial intelligence, as the latest chapter in humanity's pursuit to make the unreal come alive. Rooted in Vikki Bardot's long-standing artistic practice of exploring visual textures and dreamlike aesthetics, the film asks: What does it take to become real?
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JURY DECLARATION
The Night Award is given to "Dreamt by Another" for its enigmatic meditation on artificial intelligence, memory, identity, and the desire to become real. By weaving with means of AI literary and cinematic echoes into a dreamlike structure, the film keeps the viewer moving between wonder, uncertainty, and philosophical unease, while opening deeper questions about imagination, meaning and the ability to envision the future.
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JURY AWARD FOR PERCEPTION
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Igor Zelic |
Croatia / 2026 / 0:19:39 |
"Opera" is an experimental film that explores perception through a filmic collage constructed with the help of a sin- gle light source. Through layered manipulation of that sin- gle source, the frame gains the rhythm of multiple sources and a play of light that transforms space and perception. This is a film about how an image can conceal reality – and what happens when it can no longer do so.
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JURY DECLARATION
The Jury Award goes to "Opera" for its rigorous exploration of light, perception, and the subjective nature of perception. With minimal means, the film opens a precise and compelling reflection on how images can both reveal and conceal reality.
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DIRECTOR STATEMENT
I am grateful for this recognition. Perception is at the heart of Opera, and I am especially happy that the film was able to communicate this through its own images.
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Kent Tate |
Canada / 2025 / 0:08:08 |
Whenever I travel to places I’ve been to before, places near where I am in the present and places I’ve never been to in the past I’m reminded that nothing stands still and nothing stays the same. I also wonder what the intention was behind the restructuring of this or that in the natural world and what determined the way in which it was expressed. Sometimes it seems clear to me while at other times it doesn't seem clear to me at all. So what will others will see in the future? Will they determine that there was a coherent and considered relationship to the natural world which made our present possible or will they see chaos and competing needs with little or no coherent consideration? Eventually the world we know will disappear and will be replaced by a world we won't recognize even though it will be a world largely adapted and evolved in response to our dreams as well as our nightmares.
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JURY DECLARATION
Using only a few technical means - traveling shots and transitions - combined with a personal narration the Canadian filmmaker produces in his experimental short an amazing cinematic flow.
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MENTION FOR THE SIGNS AWARD
The Signs Award honors films, which treat an important subject in an original and convincing way
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Hiroya Sakurai |
Japan /2025 / 0:08:16 |
I focused on how the landscape is transformed when the wind as a weather phenomenon streams through the rice paddies cultivated by humans. It also portrays the lives of the farmers who cultivate these paddies and the local residents who share this environment. Weather such as wind, rainfall and sunshine are important elements in cultivation, and humans cultivate and harvest while anticipating these elements, and in this way they sustain human life. Rice paddies are not protected like a greenhouse, and they are cultivated under harsh conditions such as typhoons, droughts, and cold weather. I observed the constantly changing and transforming appearance of the rice paddies through the process of cultivation and weather. I expressed the changing landscape by connecting the sound of wind chimes, which reflect the weather, with the cultivation process.
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JURY DECLARATION
For its hypnotic visual language and its ability to transform a specific Japanese landscape into a space of memory, reflection, and quiet unease that resonates far beyond its local setting. While deeply rooted in Japan, the film speaks to a universal experience of our relationship with the natural world, drawing attention to urgent environmental concerns through a contemplative and deeply immersive cinematic approach.
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MENTION FOR THE SIGNS AWARD
The Signs Award honors films, which treat an important subject in an original and convincing wa
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Hansel and Gretel Get Kicked Out
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MilleFeuille |
Canada / 2026 / 0:11:30 |
A found-footage détournement of retail-theft surveillance, in which the criminalizing gaze of the surveillance footage is subverted by recasting capitalism as an abusive, carceral parent. Quotes transcribed from YouTube creators, who were kicked out of their homes as teens, are repurposed to ‘speak back’, buttressed by ‘poor’ low-resolution videos of stealing. Hansel and Gretel Get Kicked Out allegorizes capitalism as an abusive parent by reconfiguring dissociated internet clips into a unified chorus of forlorn rage. Music from Flowers of Romance by Michel Henritzi.
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JURY DECLARATION
Using only a few technical means - traveling shots and transitions - combined with a personal narration the Canadian filmmaker produces in his experimental short an amazing cinematic flow.
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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
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Medical Field Guide or Rules of engagement with native
e-girls
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Andran Abramjan, Jan Hofman |
Czechia / 2024 / 0:20:00 |
Through images shattered by point-cloud pellets, we dive into the consciousness of a military drone pilot on a peacekeeping mission somewhere in a foreign country. Monitoring strategic objects of desire, he contracts a bug due to an unprotected contact with the locals—setting him on a quest to regain his immunity. A satirical phantasmagoria on today's geopolitics and perversions of war embedded in modern technologies.
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JURY DECLARATION
For revealing disturbing links between drone warfare, digital control, geopolitics, and sexualised technological imagination. Its satirical form confronts systems of power that usually remain hidden or fragmented. |
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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
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J. M. Martínez |
| United States / 2024 / 0:13:00 |
A field guide: Flora evolving with environmental changes, and pollinators utilizing biomimicry. Natural objects are gathered, and sculptures of and from the landscape cast reflections of nature being infinite, self-knowing, and alive. Extinct species and stages of evolution are suggested, accompanied by field recordings capturing the underground soundscape of soil. Bird calls and wingbeats offer greetings and warnings. -A rock, a tree, a human—each dissolving into matter and transmuting into new forms.
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JURY DECLARATION
For its imaginative treatment of ecology, extinction, biomimicry, and material transformation. The film turns environmental change into a poetic and reflective cinematic field.
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