XIIIth NIGHT

FILM

From dusk to dawn, XIIIth Night unfolds as a nocturnal drift through the labyrinth of an unstable mind.

Created for Hopestacle, the film follows two rappers trapped within an endless confrontation with time. Around them, vinyl records spin, a metronome keeps beating, typewriter keys repeat their mechanical gestures and clocks fragment the night into an obsessive succession of seconds.

Time gradually takes physical form through the body of Butoh performer Ipei. Dressed in white, he moves like an apparition, a ghost or a living clock. He does not simply pursue the protagonists: he inhabits their world, appearing within mirrors, darkness and distorted spaces as an unavoidable presence.

The film moves between hip-hop, surrealism and physical performance, transforming a nocturnal journey into a mental landscape. The characters run, observe, write and perform, but remain caught inside the same continuous temporal loop.

XIIIth Night imagines time not as a measure, but as a body — an invisible force that watches us, follows us and relentlessly moves through us.

PROCESS

The visual concept was built around a single principle: the sensation of a perpetual travelling shot.

The camera continuously drifts through spaces, bodies and objects as if carried by an omniscient consciousness. We used an architectural tilt-shift lens, shifting the optical axis and deliberately destabilising perspective. Lines stretch, distances become ambiguous and the image seems to detach itself from conventional human vision.

The film was conceived as a false continuous shot, assembled through hidden transitions in darkness, overexposed lights, reflections and abstract passages. Cuts disappear inside the image, maintaining the illusion of one uninterrupted journey from dusk to dawn.

Rather than respecting classical spatial continuity, the camera follows a continuity of thought. It moves from a face to a record, from a body to a clock, from a mechanical gesture to a performance, as though travelling freely through the associations of a nocturnal mind.

The recurring objects — metronome, vinyl record, typewriter and telephone — were treated as extensions of the same temporal machinery. Their repetitive movements create a mechanical counterpoint to Ipei's organic Butoh performance.

Through continuous camera movement, optical distortion and invisible editing, the film transforms the camera into the eye of thought itself: drifting endlessly through a mind persecuted by time.