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8th International Festival Signes de Nuit - Bangkok - July 23-31, 2022

20th International Festival Signs of the Night - Thailand



 






Saturday, July 23th, 2022

Thai Archive / 16,30 h




 

Once I Passed

Martin Gerigk
United States / 2022 / 0:10:00


Walt Whitman is one of the most important poets in American literature. His main work, Leaves of Grass, was written over a period of forty years, and describes human nature, society, and the natural world, both physically and philosophically. Many have speculated about Whitman's private life, to this day. Whitman never wrote publicly about his personal relationships. In 1860, he published his poem "Once I Passed Through a Populous City", an aphoristic account of a romantic relationship with an unknown woman. In 1925, the original handwritten copy of the poem was discovered, in which Whitman writes, however, not about a woman but about an affair with a man in an anonymous city, which may have been his first physical experience of love. Whitman did not dare to publish the original version of his poem, because of the social prejudices of his time. To this day, only the altered version is printed in most anthologies. "Once I passed" is dedicated, on the one hand, to the obviously autobiographical context with all its personal drama, and on the other hand to the content of the poem itself, the profoundly quiet, yet powerful story of two lovers.

ASIA PREMIERE


 

Chile 1973

Mike Hoolboom, Jorge Lozano
Costa Rica / 2022 / 0:08:14


Based on a trove of photographs made by Koen Wessing, who bore the risk of documenting the streets of Santiago, even the dreaded stadium, newly filled with police backing the coup. When freshly elected president Allende began sharing resources with the poor, the reaction shot from Washington was predictably swift. One of Nixon’s oldest financiers worked for Pepsi, and coalmining interests were not far behind. In order to protect shareholders, the CIA put their favourite general in charge, a dictator who pipelined money into the American dream. But resistances old and new continued to grow, including interventions by radical feminist architect Josefina Mena Abraham, a legacy of upholding the commons that persists to this day.

ASIA PREMIERE





 

Refection of a Man

Martine Stig
Niederlande / 2021 / 0:17:07


"In the film essay ‘The Reflection of the Man’ Martine Stig grapples with the meaning of the human in a hybrid world. Employing ubiquitous technologies like face recognition software, while also reflecting on them, Stig examines the act of seeing beyond the explorative and the embodied. Stig uses Rorschach techniques and algorithms in order to draw closer to nonhuman companions, and speculatively broadens the concept of being present. The Reflection of the Man results from the artist ongoing dialogue with writer Ilse van Rijn about technology and memory in a more-than-human world.



 

Everything We Know About You

Roland Denning
United Kingdom / 2021 / 0:06:50


"Everything We Know About You" examines 21st century issues of data control and the insidious power of social media using mid-20th century found footage and AI synthesised voices and characters. Digital corporations ensure us the information they harvest is used to deliver what we want, but is giving us what we want a form of control? Does telling us what we want to hear polarise society? Is freedom choice anything to do with freedom? And what is the secret of making your partner smile in the morning? The dominant model of propaganda and advertising was once that of insidious authorities brain-washing us to do something we previously wouldn't wanted to do. That model is now redundant; in the current era, the anonymous algorithms of transglobal business exploit us by giving us more of what we desire.

ASIA PREMIERE


 

Light Leak

Nate Dorr
United States / 2021 / 0:08:20


Light is information, a signal more lasting than recollection. If there’s anyone out there to receive the message. Isolated in a sealed apartment, a lone observer regards an outside world outside become increasingly unreal or unreachable. Archaic illuminations, old slides and the pin-lights of the camera obscura, crawl across the walls. Connections fray. Time loses meaning. A science fictional essay film, or its inverse. A rumination on optics, memory, data, and endings.

ASIA PREMIERE




 

Self-portrait in Hell

Autoritratto all'Inferno
Federica Foglia
Canada / 2021 / 0:03:30


This hybrid piece is a collage created assembling both analog and digital material. Several layers of 8mm films merge to create a camera-less self-portrait of the filmmaker. The first layer is an 8mm orphan film (found footage) from the 1970s of a woman dancing. The second layer is an 8mm found footage film that has been buried in earth for some months. While being covered in earth, the film emulsion has been eaten by the bacterias in the ground, plus some bacterias from yeast and sugar. This technique was originally used by the Schmelzdahin group in Germany. After several weeks in soil, the film gets extracted, rinsed, and scanned via a 4K digital scanner. The third layer is an 8mm home movie that has been first decayed in soil, using the aforementioned technique, then hand-painted with ink.



 

Polycephaly in D

Michael Blayney Robinson
USA / 2021 / 0:23:00


"Polycephaly in D" is a densely collaged exploration of the existential drift, collective trauma, and psychological free-fall of the contemporary moment. Leaping, falling, and meeting your new self in an earthquake; we lose one head so as to grow another. "With 'Polycephaly in D', Michael Robinson brings his pop-archivist sensibility into conversation with the current moment. Suffused with existential dread that taps directly into pandemic-era anxieties, the film tells a story of two telepaths through a montage of found footage of natural and manmade disasters, both real and fictional." - Jordan Cronk, for Hyperallergic "What gradually emerges from this roiling cascade of garish imagery—which extends Robinson’s investigations with the detritus of pop culture, while approximating the surreal collisions of everyday doomscrolling—is the terror of being caught in an eternal, undifferentiated present. But as in Onward Lossless Follows (2017), there is in Polycephaly the humorous release of realizing the contingency of a debased present-tense view. In the film’s flashes of illumination, we realize that even amid the flood, we are capable of seeing otherwise." - Lawrence Garcia, for Reverse Shot

THAILAND PREMIERE


 

Living In A Bubble

Natalie MacMahon, Nikola Drvoshanov
Germany / 2021 / 0:07:43


When two strangers feel isolated in the big city, they soon realise that their imagination is able to bring them anywhere they would like to go, despite all the obstacles of modern society. Who says it is easy to live in our modern world? Aren’t we all a bit isolated in different ways? “Living in a bubble” tells the story of two strangers, who live in the bubble they created for themselves, which doesn’t allow them to connect to anything or anyone. Through their imagination and willpower however, they manage to break out of their isolation and open themselves up to the world. They find that there is much more out there than they would have thought and nature can be found in the most unexpected places. If we have enough courage to change our ways, we can re-discover what it feels like to be alive. Against all odds, miracles are still possible- if only we believe in them.

ASIA PREMIERE

 

The Dream Machine

Michael William West
France / 2021 / 0:09:29


A woman experiments with a Dream Machine, hoping to escape trouble. Within the light and dark of the machine, violent emotions awaken.

ASIA PREMIERE