NIGHT

Critique by Tomasz Raczkowski

Sehsüchte Film Festival provided unique moments. During a block of several variously crafted shorts from all over the world I discovered something that stands out. Without that occasion, I would probably have never known this work even existing. In Potsdam I experienced Ahmad Saleh’s Night.

The German-Qatar-Jordan-Palestine co-produced movie is barely 16 minutes long. It seems quite uneventful in terms of dramatic action as well. The title stands explicitly for the singular nocturnal moment taken from the life of a ghost-like Middle Eastern warzone. The whole thing takes place on a haunting, destroyed street, with ground covered in dust and eroding remains surrounded by the skeletons of buildings, that still serve as home to several people. The moon casts a cold, sorrowful light onto the street. Those people try to rest, clinging to the last remains of human closeness and safety in the presence of the other.

Despite there being no exposition or direct dialogue to explain the situation, it is quite clear that we witness the tragic existence of people deprived of their lives by shots, bombs, and terror, holding each other in the empty, unhuman ruins. Those derelicts probably could once have been a home for some, but most likely the old inhabitants share what they have left from the past with refugees and ghosts of those, who have been taken by the war. In this depressing setting, a lonely mother, longing for her missing child, performs the woeful, lullaby-like song that poetically comments on the world of tragedy represented by the scarred street. Melancholic and touching, the song empowers the film to be a sad, yet beautiful elegy for all those who suffer from the fires of war in Palestine, Syria, and everywhere.

Significantly, Night is an animation. Created in a stop-motion technique, the whole scene becomes even more dramatic. With artificial, yet very plastic and suggestive presence of puppets, Saleh achieves a unique balance between the story being staged and feeling like a direct representation of a very concrete situation. The movement of figures is very swift and natural to the point that it could pass as being done by real humans. At the same time, however, the objective identity of ‘actors’ is very stressed, creating an uncanny feeling of witnessing a symbolic reality, in which the real tragedies are transformed into liminal entities that evoke the traumatizing experiences within a semi-mythical, dystopian dimension. Maybe it is heaven. Maybe it is hell. Or purgatory. Maybe it is a mirror-dimension of our world, in which suffering souls inhabit tormented vessels put into sorrowful motion by the invisible (offscreen) powers.

Whatever interpretation we will go for, Night produces a haunting tale of tragic reality experienced by so many people at the same time when we sit in cinema. It is a voice from a distant place, with a song that seeks understanding and compassion throughout space, time and layers of reality. It becomes a truly unique work of art, that combines superb filmmaking craft from the whole team – animation artists, sound editors, writers to a very subtle director – with a powerful social message. With its beautiful, yet horrifying mourning incantation, Saleh’s touching piece reminds us, rather hurtfully, that in every place there are mothers and children, care and love. But it so happens, that in some places they are sentenced to torment, to eternal longing and separation as part of ‘global chess plays’ of the powerful.

 

*****