In 2016, Nanfu Wang — an acclaimed documentary filmmaker greatest identified at the moment for the candid, private approach by which she exposes the far-reaching prices of state propaganda — had simply accomplished her first characteristic movie. Hooligan Sparrow toured worldwide movie festivals, and at a kind of festivals, Rosa María Payá was within the viewers. What she noticed on display screen — a Chinese language lady combating for justice for six elementary college women who had been sexually abused, incurring the wrath of native police and nationwide officers — resonated along with her personal struggles again in Cuba. The daughter of the main dissident of Fidel Castro’s Communist Cuba, Oswaldo Payá, she picked up the place he left off after his abrupt dying in a mysterious automobile crash in 2012. Payá sought Wang out after the screening, and every discovered within the different a comrade and confidante.
Over the following seven years, Wang adopted Payá from Cuba to Puerto Rico to america, documenting her battle for a democratic Cuba and witnessing her transformation from an unwitting successor of her father to a pacesetter in her personal proper. The ensuing movie turned Night time Is Not Everlasting (2024). A portrait of Payá instructed from Wang’s perspective and along with her private inflection, the movie is a research of autocracy, resistance, and hope.
Poster for Night time Is Not Everlasting (2024), directed by Nanfu Wang
Wang’s movies usually comprise a shocking narrative flip simply over midway by. Right here, that flip is Wang’s likelihood discovery, whereas watching TV, of Payá within the entrance row of a Trump rally, smiling and cheering. How might a human rights champion, a pro-democratic chief, and a determine of freedom and justice endorse Trump, somebody who not-so-subtly resembles an autocrat? Wang leaves this query open. Her movies usually middle amorphous, usually self-contradictory establishments or concepts similar to a selected state coverage, a authorities, or the very thought of freedom. Right here, nonetheless, that topic is a particular individual. In the end, although, Wang treats Payá the identical as she would an thought, as image moderately than particular person: a lonesome determine rebelling in opposition to bigger methods, an archetype she might by no means resist. The optimistic ending of the movie can be consistent with its bigger venture of inspiring arcs moderately than particular person specifics. To paraphrase Payá’s father’s phrases and quote the movie’s title, she means that regardless of how darkish the present actuality, night time isn’t everlasting.
Night time Is Not Everlasting will start streaming on Max on November 19.
