At Night

“The film is an autofiction, a collective autofiction—with an emphasis on the fiction,” Beatrice Gibson has said of AT NIGHT, which builds upon and expands the same interest in intimacy and poetics familiar from the director’s acclaimed shorts. Her debut feature follows a filmmaker played by Gibson herself, who leaves her partner and children and travels to Paris to location scout. Across a single evening, she wanders through the city as if in a dream, crossing paths with a range of fortysomething women who candidly discuss their lives, disclosing experiences shaped by race, gender and class. With a cast of non-professionals comprised of friends and fellow artists, and a script developed out of discussions with them, AT NIGHT is animated by documentary energies; yet inspired by Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette and Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote, two literary works that reimagine the epic quest through a feminist optic, it is also a film of artifice and control, intent on disobeying established conventions of storytelling. Sinking into the darkness of the self and the world, Gibson crafts a choral reflection on what connects us and what keeps us apart. (Erika Balsom)

In the presence of Beatrice Gibson.

Beatrice Gibson (selection): A NECESSARY MUSIC (2008, K), THE FUTURE’S GETTING OLD LIKE THE REST OF US (2010, K), AGATHA (2012, K), THE TIGER’S MIND (2012, K), F FOR FIBONACCI (2015, K), CRIPPLED SYMMETRIES (2015, K), I HOPE I’M LOUD WHEN I’M DEAD (2018, K), DEUX SOEURS QUI NE SONT PAS SOEURS (2019, K)