In 2016, Nanfu Wang — an acclaimed documentary filmmaker best known today for the candid, personal way in which she exposes the far-reaching costs of state propaganda — had just completed her first feature film. Hooligan Sparrow toured international film festivals, and at one of those festivals, Rosa María Payá was in the audience. What she saw on screen — a Chinese woman fighting for justice for six elementary school girls who had been sexually abused, incurring the wrath of local police and national officials — resonated with her own struggles back in Cuba. The daughter of the leading dissident of Fidel Castro’s Communist Cuba, Oswaldo Payá, she picked up where he left off after his abrupt death in a mysterious car crash in 2012. Payá sought Wang out after the screening, and each found in the other a comrade and confidante.
Over the next seven years, Wang followed Payá from Cuba to Puerto Rico to the United States, documenting her fight for a democratic Cuba and witnessing her transformation from an unwitting successor of her father to a leader in her own right. The resulting film became Night Is Not Eternal (2024). A portrait of Payá told from Wang’s perspective and with her personal inflection, the film is a study of autocracy, resistance, and hope.
The film aligns with Wang’s former works in many thematic and aesthetic terms, such as the exploration of lofty ideals through individual stories, a lulling-turned-propulsive pace, and the deployment of her characteristically dispassionate voice-over. From the get-go, she tells us: “This is a story about Cuba, but the story began on the other side of the world, China.” Later in the film, over travelogue footage from a trip Payá took to Havana to organize a protest following the death of Fidel Castro, including posters of him and Che Guevara pasted on building facades, she meditates on public aesthetics and her “strange feeling of recognition.” Historical and personal archives are used sparingly as interjections to develop Wang’s train of thought and backstory. For example, a historical sequence juxtaposes Chinese newsreel footage of Guevara being welcomed in China in 1967 with the antagonistic account of the Cuban revolutionary by American broadcasters, while Wang’s narration accounts for her relationship with both countries.
Wang’s films often contain a surprising narrative turn just over halfway through. Here, that turn is Wang’s chance discovery, while watching TV, of Payá in the front row of a Trump rally, smiling and cheering. How could a human rights champion, a pro-democratic leader, and a figure of freedom and justice endorse Trump, someone who not-so-subtly resembles an autocrat? Wang leaves this question open. Her films typically center amorphous, often self-contradictory institutions or ideas such as a particular state policy, a government, or the very idea of freedom. Here, however, that subject is a specific person. Ultimately, though, Wang treats Payá the same as she would an idea, as symbol rather than individual: a lonesome figure rebelling against larger systems, an archetype she could never resist. The optimistic ending of the film is also in line with its larger project of inspiring arcs rather than individual specifics. To paraphrase Payá’s father’s words and quote the film’s title, she suggests that no matter how dark the current reality, night is not eternal.
Night Is Not Eternal will begin streaming on Max on November 19.
