AFI FEST 2026 — AT NIGHT

I was interested in the simple structure of a woman walking through the night, which revealed itself to me through two books—Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette and Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote. Both are gender-flipped epics about women undertaking long journeys. Kathy’s protagonist has an abortion and embarks on an oneiric quest, while Alice’s is an epic imagined in reverse. It goes down into the subconscious, the interior, rather than up into the rational mind. Alice thought knowledge came from the inside, and said repeatedly that it was a shame we never looked there. My film borrows from her poem structurally, where the subway becomes a metaphor for the unconscious – a portal to deeper realms. My idea was to fill that structure with women talking, to bring in a more choral or collective dimension.

In any grouping, there are bound to be differences. One woman’s liberation can be another woman’s oppression, and vice versa. The fascinating thing about the process, and why [At Night is] a bit of a melancholic film, is that there are things that we just don’t share, bridges between us that are too big, especially at this historical juncture. Maybe that won’t always be the case. — Beatrice Gibson

AFI Fest 2026 presents At Night, the Los Angeles premiere of artist Beatrice Gibson’s revelation of discourse between a group of women across one night in Paris. Featuring Diocouda Diaoune (who cowrote the script), psychotherapist Kátia Belo Cardoso, poet Sophie Robinson, producer Denna Cartamkhoob, artist Pauline Curnier Jardin, filmmakers Amy Gwatkin and Laida Lertxundi, model-performance artist Lily McMenamy—and Gibson herself—in semifictionalized versions of themselves, the film’s nocturnal dreamscape is set amid the city’s shops, restaurants, subways, and performance spaces (Adam Christensen rings down the curtain in riveting fashion).

Deftly situating issues of labor, identity, equity, and freedom, Gibson was awarded the Best Emerging Director Award this year at Locarno for her remarkable feature debut. See details and the link below for AFI Fest screening info.