Festival internazionale Segni della Notte - Urbino |
International Festival Signs of the Night - Urbino |
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10° Festival internazionale Segni della Notte - Urbino - April 13 - 19, 2026
24th International Festival Signs of the Night - Italy
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Hung Yi Wu |
Taiwan / 2024 / 0:22:36 22 |
Wei, a young lesbian, embarks on a graduation trip to Bangkok, with her Taiwanese classmates. Her world is turned upside down when she witnesses an intimate interaction between her crush and a male friend. In an attempt to lift her spirits, she decides to visit a Thai massage parlor with the encouragement of her classmates. There, she is introduced to Thailand's soapy massage and hesitantly selects a masseuse, awaiting selection behind a glass partition.
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JURY DECLARATION
For its original, luminous perspective on desire, queerness, and coming of age, taking a premise that could have been familiar and imbuing it with uncommon delicacy and feeling. Through intimate, carefully wrought lighting and camerawork, the film draws us into its protagonist’s interior world with rare precision, making every hesitation, embarrassment and desire palpable. With warmth, nuance, and a quietly subversive tenderness, it transforms a single encounter into a profound meditation on selfhood and queer relationship.
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SIGNS AWARD
The Signs Award honours films, which treat an important subject in an original and convincing way
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Rakan Mayasi |
Palestina / 2023 / 0:18:00 |
An Israeli family’s equilibrium gradually disintegrates as the mysterious sound of a key is heard in the door of their apartment every evening.
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JURY DECLARATION
For its devastating wit and formal audacity, using the codes of the home invasion genre to deliver a vital political statement about land, dispossession, and the right of return. Through the apparently banal sound of a key in a lock, the film constructs an inorexable and deeply unsettling metaphor for the Palestinian experience of exile, making the invisible visceral. In its economy and irony, it proves that cinema can carry the full weight of historical injustice with subtlety and subversion.
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MENTION FOR THE SIGNS AWARD
The Signs Award honours films, which treat an important subject in an original and convincing way
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Death of a Fantastic Machine
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Axel Danielson, Maximilien Van Aertryck |
Sweden / 2025 / 0:17:21 |
A visual essay examining how cameras and their economic exploitation shape our perception of reality, fueling political division in today's media-saturated world.
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JURY DECLARATION
For its exhilarating, passionately crafted love letter to the camera and to the moving image, in a visual essay of remarkable emotional sweep. Through masterful editing and the juxtaposition of archival imagery across more than a century, it traces how economic interests have shaped our relationship to images, from the earliest photographs to the age of algorithms. Poignant, urgent, and deeply didactic in the best sense, it leaves audiences with a genuine call to reclaim what it means to “watch”.
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DIRECTOR STATEMENT
As filmmakers, we've spent fifteen years investigating the history of the camera and the immense influence images have on our lives. In this short film, we focus on what emerged as the key factor in that history: how economic forces have shaped what we see, from the earliest photography to the algorithms and A.I. of today. Some estimate there are 45 billion cameras on earth — a tool that could help us understand the world, yet increasingly used to distort it. With A.I., that distortion has reached a new level. When any image can be manufactured, what happens to the camera's credibility? Can we still trust what we see? These are the questions that drove us to make this film.
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MENTION FOR THE SIGNS AWARD
The Signs Award honours films, which treat an important subject in an original and convincing way
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Adrian Flury |
Switzerland / 2024 / 0:28:00 |
Drifting through videoclips online easily leaves you distracted, lost, and back on square one. Imagine, you found a series clips organized by a sense of inchoate feeling of eclipse of time and end of the world, evoking a shared sense of fate.
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JURY DECLARATION
For its visceral and formally inventive reckoning with the climate crisis, weaving found footage, amateur recordings, and live reactions to create a disorienting yet coherent portrait of a world already living through catastrophe. From the eerie spectacle of shelf clouds and dust storms to the banality of abandoned Hollywood sets, it interrogates the very act of recording disaster, collapsing the distance between spectacle and survival. A film that shifts the meaning of “witness” in real time, it forces us to ask not only what we are watching, but what kind of world we are becoming.
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DIRECTOR STATEMENT
"Panic in Nowhere" is made entirely of found amateur video footage from youtube. It extracts the footage from its original context and and puts it in a new fictional framework. The narrative method is quite unique, and demands a new way of perceiving from the viewer. Its a great pleasure that the Festival Segni della Notte sees film as an art form and emphasize on such artistic innovation and creativity. I like how the jury statement captures the essence of the film.
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NIGHT AWARD
The Night Award honours 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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Don Josephus Raphael Eblahan |
Philippines, USA, Singapore | 2024 / 0:22:00 |
In the aftermath of an earthquake, the police find a man in the woods. A zoologist, a sound recorder, and a news team grapple with the truth that he may be the cause of all the natural disasters that devastated this small mountain town.
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JURY DECLARATION
For its mysterious and resonant weaving together of colonialism, capital, and the climate crisis into a film of striking beauty and rare ethical intelligence. Set in the mountains of the northern Philippines, it uses the grammar of magical realism to open profound questions about who speaks, who is heard, and at what cost: questions that linger long after the image fades. With exceptional sound design, visionary cinematography, and an open, elliptical ending, it stands as a quietly radical short films that challenges us to think about what it truly means to be, to relate and to communicate.
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MENTION FOR THE NIGHT AWARD
The Night Award honours 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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Charlie Kaufman |
Grece, USA / 2025 / 0:23:00 |
Two newly-dead ghosts walk the streets of Athens, among the pulsing cityscape and the ghosts of history. They were outsiders in life: he, a queer Lebanese translator; she a half-Irish photo- grapher. They wander the city together, finding consolation in the difficult beauty of life and its aftermath.
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JURY DECLARATION
For its enigmatic narrative and hauntingly surreal imagery, following a young girl as she encounters a mysterious woman returning to her small Turkish village after years abroad. With little context provided, the film invites viewers to delve into the complex emotions of loss, departure, and unspoken regret, while the striking landscapes mirror the characters’ internal isolation. The film’s ambiguity, combined with its lingering sense of unresolved tension, makes it a standout in its exploration of human connection and emotional distance.
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JURY AWARD
for its cool, overhead gaze on forms of violence and its social reflexes
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Sinan Taner |
Switzerland / 2024 / 0:18:14 |
An elementary school sports day gets out of hand. A harmless argument between two children ends in death threats between the two fathers. The collective overload shakes an entire society and unfolds into a microcosm of chaos.
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