Nighthawks, the latest short film by China-based direcor Gianpaolo Lupori, recently received international acclaim as it won the award of Best Foreign Film at 15 Minutes of Fame Film Festival in Palm Springs, Florida.
Nighthawks was also selected at the Foyle Film Festival in Derry, North Ireland.
Set in a nightmarish and claustrophobic Shanghai, Nighthawks is a dystopian film noir exploring the insidious power social media has to unleash man’s darker self and its impact on society.
On a silent summer night, down a dark backstreet, a small, dimly lit noodle shop remains open long afterhours. The silence is rudely pierced by the arrival of a chatty elderly woman. As she engages the patrons, we become witnesses to an unsettling confrontation, implicating not only those present, in a conspiracy fueled by a twisted sense of justice.
Nighthawks attempts to present challenging questions regarding the influence social media has on the way we collectively perceive and react to our environment. While the issues are universal, they are particularly relevant in today’s China where the sudden rise of social networking is radically transforming the ways not only opinions are formed but how action is taken both collectively and individually; creating new patterns to the ways we perceive individual rights, authority, privacy, justice and democracy, as well as stirring collective behaviors which had been laying dormant.
