Six women wander through Paris at night, a filmmaker, a former sex worker, and a Black single mother. In scenes that sometimes verge on fiction, we see their conversations, encounters, and moments alone, and hear poetry by Alice Notley, Kathy Acker, and others on the soundtrack. It is a film about sex, pregnancy, and aging, about meeting expectations and breaking free from them, but above all about what it means for women to move through the night. The night brings intimacy, but also, for women, uncertainty—and menace.
The film manages to evoke an almost existential feeling: one that women carry within them, one that creeps into the body from the moment you learn as a girl that it is better not to be alone in the dark; the sense of unease attached to the words “a woman alone.” With a haunting score and tactile 16mm camerawork that captures pools of neon light in the darkness, this is a sensory and intellectual exploration of the night—a night that never simply belongs to women.
Stills
