“At Night,” the full-length feature directorial debut of British filmmaker and artist Beatrice Gibson, will have its world premiere at the Locarno Film Festival on August 8 in the Filmmakers of the Present competition program. The festival’s 79th edition runs through August 15 in Switzerland.
The experimental film follows six women navigating Paris during nighttime hours, with their individual journeys interweaving elements of reality, dreams, and fiction. The narrative explores encounters at various urban locations including bus stops, shops, restrooms, and bars, where characters express their aspirations, sexual desires, and concerns regarding their futures. According to the film’s synopsis, central characters include a filmmaker grappling with understanding her own work, a Black single mother rejecting imposed categorizations, a former sex worker examining her past, and a poet who has abandoned hopes of motherhood. The work examines themes of sexuality, money, motherhood, and mental health through conversations among Gibson’s non-professional actor friends and artistic influences.
Gibson wrote and directed the film, working with longtime cinematographer collaborator Ben Rivers and editor Liyo Gong. Production companies Somesuch and Norte Productions brought the project to completion over a six-year development period. The film incorporates poetry as a recurring element, featuring a recitation by American poet Alice Notley of one of her own works, recorded months before her death in 2025. Gibson drew conceptual inspiration from Notley’s book-length poem “The Descent of Alette” (1992) and Kathy Acker’s gender-reversed narrative “Don Quixote, Which Was a Dream” (1986).
Gibson describes her casting methodology as unconventional, prioritizing selection of performers who might generate interesting results before developing material collaboratively. Cast members contributed their own writing for their scenes based on what they wished to explore. This collective approach reflects Gibson’s broader artistic philosophy emphasizing collaboration and improvisation. She explains that the extended production timeline accommodated the sensitive process of generating autofictional material, requiring multiple revisions to ensure participants felt secure with their authored content, its placement, and collaborative context. Gibson also appears in front of the camera, a decision she attributes to feeling responsibility to address her own privilege and explore critical tensions regarding race and class dynamics that emerged during production.
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