11/04/2025 - In the final chapter of his touching trilogy about migration, Sylvain George and his protagonists arrive in the city of Paris where splendour flirts with misery

Having previously filmed his young protagonists in Melilla, a Spanish enclave in Morocco which acts as a base for travelling on towards the much-coveted European mainland, Sylvain George is continuing his journey in Paris where Malik, Mehdi and Hassan are now living. Presented in a world premiere within the Visions du Réel Festival‘s International Feature Film Competition, Obscure Night - "Ain’t I a Child?” is a cinematographic essay bursting with poetry which returns dignity to deeply wounded bodies which are fleeing suffering, clinging on to their last remaining glimmers of hope. In this sense, fantasy turns into an irreplaceable balm which manages - even if only for a moment, when their eyelids close and the film’s protagonists are spirited away by the Sandman, or when drugs take them to a distant realm - to anaesthetise a profound pain which is fast reaching abyssal depths.

This third part in the trilogy about migratory policies (after Obscure Leaves – Wild Leaves (the Burning Ones, the Obstinate) [+see also:
trailer
film profile] and Obscure Night – Goodbye Here, Anywhere [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Sylvain George
film profile]) opens with a series of images, filmed on a mobile phone, of a group of youngsters who are little more than children, aboard a Zodiac boat shouting “Europe, Europe!” ecstatically. It’s a hope-filled joy which clashes with a far darker reality in this film which is full of violence and misery but which also offers fleeting moments of brotherhood and tenderness. Events that seem normal to us, like getting a haircut or embracing, are revolutionary acts for the film’s protagonists, assertions on the part of bodies which are still alive despite the violence they’ve suffered, bodies which can still find warmth in the little humanity they have left. These initial frames - the only colourful images in this movie which is dominated by magnificent and poetic black and white - seem to reflect the joy, if not the ecstasy of these protagonists who are convinced that there must still be light at the end of the tunnel. It might seem absurd that such hope persists after everything they’ve been through, but it’s the only thing keeping them alive in a world which rejects them day after day. What would they have, if not for hope?

A raging torrent of a movie, this 164-minute work doesn’t claim to be a treatise on migration policies: it’s a meticulous observation of an increasingly complex situation. Its aim is to get inside of this reality, putting itself at the same level of those experiencing it first-hand, forcing viewers to stop and observe that which they often avoid so as to sidestep the discomfort or guilt which inevitably overcomes them. Staying ever-close to its protagonists, the camera approaches their bodies revealing whatever it is they’re trying to hide: a scar, a broken tooth, the natural rashes common to teenage skin... These seemingly banal details lend humanity and concreteness to these human beings who live like shadows in our cities, occupying the cramped, dark and dirty spaces which “regular people” avoid.

The film seems to be based on the observation that migration policies and the way in which they’re conceived are foundering and result in the human tragedies who are silently inhabiting our European cities. The question asked by the trilogy, therefore, is how do the bodies of those who’ve survived the journey to Europe adapt to this failing, like plants grow in cement; how do they survive tragedy, take control of their lives and mould the places which surround and reject them.

Just like its predecessors, this movie is poetic and political, sensitive and essential, giving back dignity to these people with stolen childhoods who, by some miracle, are still living with the same hope inhabiting their peers who arrive in Europe every day in search of a better life.

Obscure Night - "Ain’t I a Child?” was produced by Noir Production (France), Alina Film (Switzerland), Kintop (Portugal) and RTS Radio Télévision Suisse.

(Translated from Italian)