15/03/2024
We have the pleasure to remind the
JURY AWARD FOR HARMONY BETWEEN IMAGE, POEM AND MUSIC
of the 7° Festival internazionale Segni della Notte - Urbino / Italy
http://www.segnidellanotte.com
has been attributed in the Cinema in Transgression Section to
The Life We Live Is Not Life Itself
Ian Gibbins
Greece / 2021 / 0:08:45 17
“The life we live is a series of illusions… a fleeting smile… mistaken decisions… dangerous, unpredictable… yet, we will meet again, as lovers… parents… children… and you will know who I am…” Tasos Sagris’s poem, with its haunting soundtrack by Whodoes, offers us an extended exploration of lives lived in parallel, at cross-purposes, in and out of love, around the world, from the innocence of children to the wisdom of elders. There are the good times when summer seems to last forever, and the bad, when persecution and misadventure could land us in prison, with nothing but rain to hear our voice. But what is the reality? What is mere illusion? Can there be more to life than simply living?
JURY DELARATION
In an anti-pleonastic way, this film proposes a work that is nourished on the original voice of the Greek poet, Tasos Sagris, and the sound of the group WhoDoes, offering surreal pictorial compositions. It is a beautiful tribute, between art and science, on the meaning of life and understanding the complexity of time from an Australian poet, director Ian Gibbins, to another poet, this time Greek.
DIRECTOR STATEMENT
This film arose from a collaboration after I met poet, Tasos Sagris, and musician Whodoes, in Athens at a poetry film festival supported by the Institute for Experimental Arts. Tasos’ poetry is very different from mine and it took us a while to decide on a suitable approach to the film. I do not usually have people in my work, but the relationships between people at different times of their lives was a critical aspect of the poem. Instead of actors, I ended up using a library of faces generated by artificial intelligence from a commercial source that employs paid models as their source material, so avoiding the difficult ethical issues of many AI generators. I animated these faces so they change in age or gender or both as they look on from windows and billboards at various locations in the film.
The locations themselves were mostly recorded around Adelaide, South Australia, where I live. But almost none of the images is actually how the scenes look in real life: nearly all of them have been composited and animated from multiple sources or time points. So the “real” people in the scenes are often seen as doubles, walking beside or following themselves. Dominating the visual theme is the rain that haunts Tasos’ poem and that reflects the incipient results of climate change we all face. But, as with the people, all the scenes containing rain, running water or storms have been composited. Thus, the film drifts between the real and the imagined, the remembered and the predicted, the certain and the uncertain. Nevertheless, as Tasos’ poem says, “we will meet again”. In making the film, we faced many artistic and technical challenges: we are delighted that it has been so successful.
See all awards:
http://www.segnidellanotte.com/2023/_awards.htm
# # # URGENT IMPORTANT # # #
The submission for the 8° Festival internazionale Segni della Notte - Urbino
April 10-14, 2024 are open now
Submissions on our platforms:
Filmfreeway
https://filmfreeway.com/FestivalinternationalSignesdeNuit
# # # # # Join us # # # # #
Film Submissions - Contact - Web Pages - Facebook - Twitter - Instagram - Telegram - Vimeo - Address
https://linktr.ee/signesdenuithas
