AT NIGHT (TIFF 2026) – Review by Leslie Combemale
TIFF release At Night, the first feature film release from artist and filmmaker Beatrice Gibson, was six years in the making. Loosely based on the writings of poet Alice Notley but developed through the collaboration of the non-actors performing onscreen, the movie comes together as a melancholy meditation. It follows six women as they experience and interact with strangers and each other in the streets, metros, and cafes of Paris after dark.
Filmmaker B (played by Gibson herself) works through writers block and some guilt around past dealings with friend Didi. At one point Didi (played by educator Diocouda Diaoune) and B bump into each other at a corner market. After it loses electricity, they sit and discuss their past, with B finding herself confronted by Didi about her privilege. “Inequality is toxic”, Didi says, and an uncomfortable conversation ensues. Another scene features a group of women in a late night bar, drinking and discussing their lives, including sex, family, and fertility, performed by non-actors who are poets and artists. Other scenes later in the film are more like dreamscapes, including one in which performer and artist Adam Christensen sings and plays accordion in a cabaret. It is mesmerizing.
The whole thing meanders as if we, the women in the audience, are also walking and roaming the streets of late night Paris, but not in any kind of romantic way. This is about women facing their limitations and challenges, including Black women, with their experiences of race and class, and the privilege of the White women they know. They discuss them or muse about them out loud. Often the poetry of Alice Notley accompanies women as they wander Paris.
While it couldn’t be more feminist if it tried, the film just presents these characters, with their discussions about motherhood, career, class, and sexuality, plainly, and without fanfare or fuss. We are a fly on the wall. You’d never know those onscreen aren’t actors, but that is, in part, because Gibson is using the performers’ own thoughts, injecting the poetry in the quieter moments.
This isn’t a film you’d normally see funded and presented in theaters, and it’s the better for it. It’s a collaborative work of feminist art. Its point is not to have a story arc, it’s to include us in the authentic thoughts and experiences of a small group of women, on one single night, possibly like any other in their lives.
3 1/2 out of 5 stars.
