Beatrice Gibson on her Paris nocturne At Night: “One woman’s liberation can be another woman’s oppression, and vice versa”
In her award-winning first feature At Night, women drift through the Paris night sharing stories of creativity, motherhood, desire and difference. Ahead of its premiere at LFF, Gibson spoke to us about collective authorship and the politics of listening.
There are certain conversations that can only happen at night, when your guard is down and the bonds of intimacy have been established. In Beatrice Gibson’s neon-streaked nocturne At Night, the hours of darkness facilitate the gathering of women, who walk the streets of Paris – alone, until they are no longer. Meeting at bus stops, poetry readings or Tibetan pool bars, they talk about matters ranging from creativity to class, the struggles of motherhood and sexual desire. There’s another side to the city that we only catch at night, too. Shot by filmmaker Ben Rivers, Gibson’s regular collaborator, on 16mm film, At Night chronicles Paris’s night-time economy through fixed shots of the signage and shuttering storefronts on launderettes and butchers’. The night is full of potential, but walking its streets carries with it an ambient sense of dread.
Gibson’s feature debut, which won the Best Emerging Director award at the 2026 Locarno Film Festival, begins as a meta-fiction on the making of a film, but soon widens its focus into the polyvocal: an open-ended examination of the world at mid-life, and how the choices we make lead us down particular paths in life. As in Gibson’s earlier work, the boundaries between fiction and documentary, fantasy and reality, the personal and the political, melt and intermix. Described by the filmmaker as a “collective autofiction”, At Night was co-authored with a principal cast of non-professional actors including psychotherapists, artists and poets. We spoke with Gibson about literary influence, positionality and collaborative processes.
Sophia Satchell-Baeza: What motivated your move into feature filmmaking? And where did the story for At Night emerge from?
Beatrice Gibson: I had resisted making a longer film for many years, seeing it as an expected industry trajectory: you make short films and then bloom into creating something more important. To me, a masterpiece can be three minutes or one-and-a-half hours long, it makes no difference. But I wanted to be in the filming process for longer; to dive deeper.
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.
You’ve mentioned Nell Dunn’s book Talking to Women (1965) as an inspiration. It’s still rare to watch long-form, exploratory conversations play out between women. How important was conversation to the making of this film?
I wanted to explore what happens when we bring together an intersectional group of women from varied backgrounds and positionalities to explore our shared experiences. With [producer] Denna Cartamkhoob, we sent people individual questions that were inspired by Dunn’s book. Things like: Can you relate an ecstatic experience, sexual or non-sexual? Have you given birth? Do you have a literary figure that’s particularly meaningful for you? People answered individually. When they came back with their responses, we’d see if a conversation could be built around that. The film’s development was during Covid so this was all done on Zoom. In the first collective gathering, there was some tension and a bit of disconnect. Looking back at the transcripts, we decided not to iron that out but to stay with the discomfort. A lot of the issues that came up remain in the film as unresolvable tensions. That’s what makes the film very prismatic.
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 it’s 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.
At what point did you decide to star in the film?
In the beginning I wanted to make a film about trying to be together at a time when everyone is divided. Maybe it was a naive and misguided thing to do, although I would do it again. I didn’t realise the extent to which race and class would play out during that process. I come from a place of privilege and several other characters don’t. There was a critical tension in that, so I wrote my character in as a way to explore it. The film is an auto-fiction, so generating material is a delicate and sensitive process that takes a lot of time and revision. People need to feel comfortable with what they’ve authored, where it’s placed, with whom it’s in dialogue – how it’s fictionalised, basically. It’s quite a deep process.
[Actor] Diocouda Diaoune and I wrote the shop scene together with Sophie Robinson, an incredible poet who also stars in the film. That scene is quite uncomfortable and difficult in some ways. It was really important to Liyo Gong, the editor, and I to keep the film open.
Can you tell me about the editing process?
Liyo is an amazing editor. I can honestly say that she co-authored this film. She handled the material in all its complexities, with deep political awareness. I wanted to work with someone who could hold the perspectives of the women of colour in the film, as well as mine; whose experience of being a second-generation immigrant mirrored theirs. Liyo had all these experiences and skill sets, including performing as a non-professional [in Bas Devos’s Here, 2023], so I felt she would be able to really empathise with the characters.
My lonely, wandering, sad self was constructed in the edit. We did a three-week principal shoot to get the bones of the film, but I stressed to the producer that I tend to edit and shoot simultaneously. It’s the nature of how I work, partly responding to a process and partly using pre-scripted material.
I’m often asked in interviews whether certain things in the film really happened. It’s very frustrating. At Night explores structural, social, political and economic issues from a female perspective. Yes, the stories and characters in it are constructed via lived experience, but it’s a highly crafted piece of work. The characters are crucially scripted in relation to a whole. People seem to want confession and anecdote; they are fixated on what’s real. I find it very curious.
But the film is so stylised, which shatters any sense of the real, of the purely personal.
Exactly. I was thinking about this idea of the poetic self yesterday. Alice’s poetic self, the ‘I’ in her poetry, collapses the boundaries between autobiography, fantasy, dream, fiction. It’s all of those things. There isn’t really a discussion in poetry about whether something is real or fake. You’re using the self to ask questions. For me that’s a good way of circumnavigating questions around authenticity, as At Night opens up into this more plural, searching ‘I’.