AT NIGHT Discovery

At once hypnotic and evocative, British artist and filmmaker Beatrice Gibson’s feature debut, which received the Best Emerging Director Award at this year’s Locarno Film Festival, is a mesmerizing work of autofiction exploring personal malaise and communal dialogue among six women over a single night in Paris. Lensed by cinematographer Ben Rivers (A SPELL TO WARD OFF THE DARKNESS, AFI FEST 2013) in 16mm, the nocturnal city is alluringly shaped by its analog ambience, from the quiet liminality of empty streets and fluorescent Metro stations, to the intimately inhabited local bars and neighborhood galleries. Traversing these spaces are a former sex worker reflecting on her past, a poet contending with her infertility; and anchoring this eclectic mix of creatives and academics is the estranged central relationship between a filmmaker named B (embodied by Gibson in a fictionalized self) on a location-scouting trip and single mother and B’s previous employee, Didi (Diocouda Diaoune, who co-wrote the script). Intersecting between the disparate and converging paths of these women, and interpolating the texts by feminist literary figures like June Jordan, Kathy Acker and Alice Notley, Gibson boldly articulates a refreshingly honest and sometimes difficult conversation on identity, solidarity, sexuality, race and class privilege. Drifting between fiction, reality and dream in its languid rhythm and poetic meditation, the axiom of womanhood and the dialogue of politics are always shifting, reinventing and evolving. –Anna Li