19/08/2026 - Beatrice Gibson’s feature debut is an atmospheric roundelay through nocturnal Paris, exploring the lives of a broad spectrum of women

In Beatrice Gibson’s feature debut, At Night, the artist and filmmaker downplays her own viewpoint and lived experience to usher in the broader perspectives of others. Against its opening shots of a serenely still Paris Metro tunnel, we hear the voice-over lines of US poet Alice Notley, recorded specifically for this project: “I am a tone of voice. Warming, shifting, pausing, changing, including, asserting, exulting, including, turning and including” – a veritable manifesto for the work to come. And for the many on-screen participants in the film, the majority playing themselves, the content of the dialogue was also drawn directly from their lives and then workshopped. Yet with the movie winning the Best Emerging Director Award in Locarno’s Filmmakers of the Present, where it just premiered, we gauge how Gibson can seamlessly merge these conflicting voices, with part of her signature as an artist – seen also in the short work preceding At Night – being a discerning and perceptive curation of radical feminist voices and texts.

At Night is a notably ensemble-driven film, creating a loose framework where it observes a quotidian urban Paris at dusk, before setting up various vignettes and minor, unresolved character arcs for its dramaturgic scenes. Gibson herself has a prominent on-screen role: credited simply as “B.”, she’s shown location scouting and researching for a film project, most likely the one we’re seeing – this gesture amounts to her productive hesitance over the film to come, and hints that even if At Night is technically “finished”, her wandering, yet rigorous, thought process and self-scrutiny can never be. Another principal character is Didi (Diocouda Diaoune), a partially estranged friend of B.’s who she seeks a reconciliation with; a black single mother living in outer-Paris social housing, she was a minder for B.’s daughter at an unspecified earlier point, and tension over their gulf in social privilege created fissures in their relationship, which B. seeks to mend – an objective whose implicated feminist discourses echo into the film’s overall project.

With experimental filmmaker Ben Rivers lending his hand as cinematographer, summoning evocative moonlit textures on 16 mm, we also glimpse a long bar-table debate between an unrelated group of characters, who have just attended a librairie poetry reading. Their ensuing precise dialogue, with its sense of argumentative balance, is a bit unnatural in its articulacy, yet we’re gripped as they vocalise an unusually broad set of perspectives on women’s sexuality and gender identity, alongside questions of motherhood and conventional family structures. Music is another vital aural component to these pervasive “voices”, from the whisper-delicate electroacoustic score by Elvin Brandhi to a cabaret performance by artist Adam Christensen that evokes a gender-flexible variant on Scott Walker’s tremulously sung late work.

Although always testifying to Notley’s call for an “exulting, including” voice, and consistently probing the limits of various rigorously argued feminist positions, Gibson’s work still slightly falters by grasping for a common vision of womanhood, with its trim summary of intersectional talking points. Yet, she still offers a metaphorical visual gateway out of this, through that yawning underground tunnel – an invitation to step into our subconscious, to continue this hard, but rewarding, process of utopian feminist inquiry. 

At Night is a co-production by the UK and France, staged by Somesuch, Norte Productions and BBC Film.