United Kingdom
2026 | 87 min. | Fiction

Six women roam the neon-lit city of Paris after dark. At bus stops and corner shops, in toilets and bars, they give voice to their dreams, sexual desires, and uncertainties about the future. A filmmaker struggles to understand the film she is making. A black, single mother refuses the categories imposed upon her. A former sex worker reflects on her past. A poet gives up trying for a child. Inspired by the writings of cult literary figures Alice Notley, June Jordan, and Kathy Acker, Beatrice Gibson's mesmerising debut feature journeys to the end of the night, observing night workers and nocturnal denizens as they wander the city in search of answers.

Directed by: Beatrice Gibson
Written by: Beatrice Gibson
Produced by: Scott O'Donnell, Denna Cartamkhoob, Beatrice Gibson
Cinematography: Ben Rivers
Editing: Liyo Gong
Production Design: Lucie Beauvert
Costume Design: Holly Rebecca
Make-Up & Hair: Crystabel Efemena Riley
Original Score: Elvin Brandhi
Sound: Andy Neil, Dana Farzanehpour
Cast: Diocouda Diaoune (Didi), Kátia Belo Cardoso (Kátia), Beatrice Gibson (B), Sophie Robinson (Sophie), Amy Gwatkin (Amy), Lily McMenamy (Lily), Adam Christensen (Adam), Denna Cartamkhoob (Denna), Pauline Curnier Jardin (Pauline), Laida Lertxundi (Laida)

Statement of the director:
AT NIGHT is a non-binary entity, sitting between documentary and fiction, liquefying the division between the two. Non-professional actors playing themselves are its fictional core.

In AT NIGHT, the protagonist, Diocouda Diaoune, is a container for all the other women in the film, an alibi for their conversations. Diocouda’s story contains and mirrors the other characters’ stories in the film. The characters in AT NIGHT are singular and plural at the same time. They come from a wide variety of backgrounds and ethnicities, they want conflicting things, have conflicting opinions. AT NIGHT features an ensemble cast of women and non-binary people, from diverse backgrounds and socio-economic worlds: It has angry characters, characters who are joyful characters who are grieving, characters who are in love, characters who are loving. It has all these contradictory feelings and experiences and positions in it, and it leans into the necessary awkwardness of all these things, placing them tenderly next to each other, side by side. A host of multiplicities encounter and hold each other despite their seemingly insurmountable differences. It is a film about togetherness, as a tactic, a mode of being, it’s about solidarity within or despite difference, about intimacy and tenderness, at a time when such things risk being eroded entirely by relentless individualism and neoliberal capitalism. The characters in the film find and sustain each other by chance in a world in political, social and economic chaos.

In AT NIGHT it’s not me, the director, telling or writing the story of any one of its characters; it’s a conversation between me and the characters. We have written it together, in relationship to one another. It has been developed and co-written by its cast, over a 3-year period. The stories in it are real, they are real-life experiences, and the characters are crafted and played by the people that wrote them. This cast of my contemporaries; artists, musicians, poets, performers – all of them playing versions of themselves.

As a director, I don’t have a predetermined argument when I sit down to make a film – I make films to ask questions about what it means to be alive at my particular historical juncture, from my particular perspective. I make films to find something out about myself and about the world and to imagine or reimagine how to exist in that world. Those questions are invariably asked from my own point of view. They are investigated from an emotional rather than a linear point of view. They value the everyday, the emotional, the oneiric and the unconscious, feminine constellations, over masculinist techno-heroic ones. They believe in our inner lives as valid places for the production of knowledge.

AT NIGHT has been shot by our cinematographer Ben Rivers (a renowned director in his own right) on 16mm, at night in Paris. It is close-up and uses natural light, to capture the anxiety, fear, and neon-soaked magic of the nocturnal and the melting pot of communities that traverse the city at night.

Production:
Somesuch
https://somesuch.co