The Night Visitors (Michael Gitlin, 2023)

Since the mid-1980s, experimental filmmaker Michael Gitlin has steadily worked away on an eclectic series of projects, including Duplicating the Copy from Memory, The Birdpeople, The Earth Is Young and That Which Is Possible.  Over the decades, Gitlin has seen his work selected for numerous international film festivals, including the London Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival, and International Film Festival Rotterdam.  It is at the last of these where Gitlin's latest film, The Night Visitors, played as part of the 2024 edition's Harbour strand, in which it took its place alongside the likes of festival opener Head South, Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo's eagerly awaited horror The Soul Eater, and Rotterdam favourite Amanda Kramer's new film, So Unreal.  Having received its Dutch premiere at the festival, The Night Visitors had its third and final IFFR outing in early February, when it screened at the city's KINO.

The Night Visitors is a documentary all about moths, and in less than 75 minutes Gitlin's film casts its net (ha!) far and wide as it examines these nocturnal lepidopterans.  Given that there are around 160,000 species of moth, the film can only look at a relatively small sample of these inscrutable creatures, but Gitlin sprinkles The Night Visitors with some striking examples: the tree-munching spongy (formerly gypsy) moth (Lymantria dispar); the giant, silk-making Polyphemus moth (Antheraea polyphemus); and the gorgeous, brightly-coloured rosy maple moth (Dryocampa rubicunda).  While there are plenty of fully grown moths on show, the film is punctuated with fascinating footage of several instars as a caterpillar undergoes its transformation.  The Night Visitors is an experience that allows us to get up close and personal with its title characters, with the superb cinematography befitting of a top-class nature documentary.     

Indeed, there are times during The Night Visitors when you have to remind yourself you're watching the work of a video artist known for his avant-garde efforts, as the film almost plays as a straight, linear piece of nonfiction—albeit one that exhibits the odd experimental flourish.  A fair chunk of the running time is devoted to the curious story of Frenchman Étienne Léopold Trouvelot, an astronomer and amateur entomologist who perhaps should have stuck exclusively to the former role, given that his botched efforts at silk harvesting led to the spread of the aforementioned spongy moth.  Trouvelot brought some of the now-invasive species' egg masses into the US from Europe and was raising the moths in controlled conditions when some of the larvae escaped; with the catastrophic damage done—the caterpillars now defoliate over a million acres of forest every year—Trouvelot lost interest in entomology and eventually returned to France, where he remained until his death.    

The Night Visitors also references Edgar Allan Poe's "The Sphinx", a New York-set tale in which the protagonist encounters the badass outsider that is the death's-head hawkmoth (Acherontia atropos)—even if the species wasn't, and isn't, to be found in the United States.  As Gitlin wryly observes, "never let geographical distribution get in the way of overwrought symbolism" (while there are several voiceovers on the soundtrack, this particular nugget—like much of the film's most interesting information—is relayed via concise onscreen text).  The Night Visitors' inclusion of "The Sphinx"—which is here given a brief, witty precis—provides a tangible link to Gitlin's 1996 film Berenice, a freewheeling adaptation of Poe's eponymous short story.  As experimenta goes, The Night Visitors is certainly one of the more accessible examples; it's a fluid, engaging and beguiling work, one which provides a very welcome insight into the opaque lives of these remarkable insects.

Darren Arnold

Images: Festival Scope

You Promised Me the Sea (Nadir Moknèche, 2023)

Nadir Moknèche's debut feature Le harem de Mme Osmane was released nearly 25 years ago, and the director followed that film with the Belgian co-production Viva Laldjérie, which played at the 2005 edition of IFF Rotterdam; since then, he's directed several solid features (Lola Pater, Goodbye Morocco, Délice Paloma) en route to his latest effort, You Promised Me the Sea (French: L'air de la mer rend libre).  Moknèche's new film was one of the selections for this year's BFI Flare, where it screened alongside several other strong examples of francophone cinema including Chloé Robichaud's Days of Happiness, Edith Chapin's Sex is Comedy: The Revolution of Intimacy Coordinators, Jérémy Piette's The Blue Shelter, and Paul B. Preciado's Orlando, My Political Biography.       

Moknèche's previous film, the aforementioned Lola Pater—which starred the legendary Fanny Ardant and featured a juicy role for the excellent Belgian actress Lucie Debay—hinged on a parent who'd long kept a secret from their adult son, and in You Promised Me the Sea this scenario is inverted as twentysomething butcher Saïd (Youssouf Abi-Ayad) goes to great lengths to hide his homosexuality from his mother and father.  Saïd's efforts to keep a lid on his clandestine life extend as far as acquiescing to an arranged marriage to Hadjira (Kenza Fortas), a rather reserved young woman who has recently completed a stint in prison.  Given their respective circumstances, there's a sense that the marriage may prove useful to both Hadjira and Saïd—that said, they still have to go through the experience of living together.

Hadjira and Saïd aren't particularly fond of each other to begin with, and the pair soon settle into an unhappy domesticity in which Hadjira becomes increasingly isolated as the distant Saïd spends his evenings arranging hookups via a dating app.  It's clear that Hadjira, who is unaware of her husband's real sexual identity, would like to make a go of the marriage and start a family, but Saïd is both physically and emotionally absent, and the couple make little progress.  As someone who was jailed largely on account of her ill-judged relationship with a drug dealer, Hadjira views the situation as a chance for a fresh start, but Saïd has no interest in becoming someone else and isn't looking to embrace a heterosexual relationship—although he does at least try to maintain the façade, lest his parents discover the truth.  

With You Promised Me the Sea, Nadir Moknèche has created a subtle, engaging tale, one in which the simplicity of the setup belies the effectiveness of the end product.  The film is underpinned by a wonderfully sympathetic turn from Kenza Fortas, an actress previously best known for both playing the title role in 2018's Shéhérazade and her substantial part in Cédric Jimenez's exemplary action thriller The Stronghold.  Youssouf Abi-Ayad is also very good, and he has a tougher task on his hands as he vies to make the slippery Saïd a likeable, relatable character.  The two leads are backed by a fine supporting cast, of which Zahia Dehar and the fine, stalwart Zinedine Soualem are the most memorable performers.  As with Lola Pater, Moknèche here presents the viewer with very little that is new, but there can be few complaints when a film is as well-crafted as this.

Darren Arnold

Images: Pyramide Films