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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Richard Peter 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...
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JURY DECLARATION
A nocturnal ramble through grasslands, skeletal dwellings, and deserted roads, shot with a handheld flash gun and Bolex in a series of rapid, “crime-scene” illuminations of milliseconds, that transform familiar landscapes into something deeply, inexplicably haunted. Bold, at times overwhelming, it never loses its grip, transmitting the unease of approaching darkness as both a physical and historical force. In its radical interrogation of what cinema can do with light and time, it invites us to rethink not only what we are seeing, but what seeing itself means.
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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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Liian sininen taivas |
Risto-Pekka Blom |
Finland / 2026 / 0:15:00 |
A story about money, power, exploitation, and many possible ends of the world. Some long for Mars, others for heaven. Some dance the humppa on the moon. In this short and tragicomic play, every one of us has our own small part to play.
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JURY DECLARATION
Narrated from the submerged, unexpected vantage point of a freshwater pearl mussel tracing 150 years of human history, this experimental documentary reframes the climate crisis as a story of power, capital, and greed seen – or unseen – from below. Through incisive montage and a sharp ironic intelligence, it dismantles the hubris of misguided apocalyptic predictions while quietly insisting on what is already being lost. Urgent, subversive, and formally inventive, it requalifies the human role in the world with a clarity that leaves us with no comfortable place to stand.
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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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Michelle Trujillo |
USA / 2026 / 0:06:22 |
Hurricane anxiety takes a visceral form as the image searches for an escape route. Inspired by true events. Created on 16mm film and developed with comfrey, mint, yerba mate and willow leaves.
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JURY DECLARATION
Shot on 16mm, with the film strip itself subjected to alternative destructive processes that encapsulate the subject it evokes, this is a film whose form is its argument: the disintegration of the material becomes the disintegration of certainty, of safety, of sky. Through an immersive, at times overwhelming sound design and imagery that pulses with what might be called hurricane anxiety, it transmits the lived, bodily experience of extreme weather with rare immediacy. Beneath its formal intensity, the film quietly but insistently raises larger questions about the human forces that shape these storms – and what it means to endure them.
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JURY AWARD
for its tender collage of unspoken minds
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You're not a Fool, Grandpa
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Tu n'es pas fou Papi |
Adrien Lhoste |
France / 2024 / 0:04:13 |
A little girl, now a woman, writes to her grandfather, wounded by a mental disorder. She watches him as he seethes inwardly, pondering the place of childhood in suffering.
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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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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
A film of exceptional poignancy and creative daring, it weaves together queer desire, theatrical history, and the textures of digital marginality into a meditation on what it means to love and long in spaces where that love is increasingly under threat. Its montage is at once fragile and bold, drawing on the intertextual richness of historical cinema and performance to give voice to experiences that mainstream representation continues to erase. With its layered, intimate imagery and its refusal of easy resolution, it stands as a moving elegy for all that is dismissed, forgotten, or forced underground.
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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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Organising Principles of Experience
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Gabriela Tropia |
United Kingdom / 2025 / 0:13:00 |
Organising Principles of Experience is an experimental short in which an AI model, tuned to the writings and sensibilities of Maya Deren, collaborates with the filmmaker to imagine new films. It explores memory, possession, and the digital afterlife, questioning what remains when the past becomes data and how an artist might lay claim to her absent hero.
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JURY DECLARATION
Ingenious in its exploration of creativity and reanimation, this film asks what it means to reconstitute a consciousness and what is forged or lost in the process. Through a fascinating entanglement of artificial intelligence, the lived experience of Maya Derren in Haiti, voodoo, and rebirth, it questions whether an algorithm can truly forge a thought, a feeling or a self. Poised between the deeply human and the compulational, it pushes AI generation into something genuinely intriguing and destabilises the very notion of creation
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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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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
Rooted in Buckminster Fuller’s concept of Spaceship Earth – the idea that all living beings are passengers aboard a self-contained and vulnerable world – the film folds travel, observation, and ecological transformation into a meditation on motion and stillness, presence and loss. Its formal continuity, between the act of travelling and the act of watching a world be restructured around us, opens a quiet but insistent reflection on who holds the power to reshape a landscape, and at what cost. As we move through it, the film gently but persistently turns a single question back on us: who, exactly, is the passenger?
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