An Even More Obscure Night: The Strategy of Resistance of the Untamed and the Untamable

The text discusses the latest film by the French cineaste Sylvain George Obscure Night – Goodbye Here, Anywhere (Nuit obscure – Au revoir ici, n’importe où, 2023). The filmmaker’s latest documentary presents the situation and the fate of children left to themselves, children who, in their yearning for a better future in Europe, got “stranded” on the coast of Melilla, a Spanish enclave in the north of Morocco. As, for the first time in George’s oeuvre, the film focuses exclusively on children and adolescents, the means of expression and modes of representation are adapted to the protagonists, taking into account the binding ethical aspect of the documentary depiction of the most vulnerable “social actors”. The specificity of the situation and the location of the protagonists corresponds to the specificity of non-places as defined by Marc Augé and a unique temporality, which disperses and condenses in the form of temporal interactions beyond chronological linearity. George’s auteur approach thus represents a form of conveying an embodied experientiality of refugees, in which we can relive their identity of “wild children” and “untamed animals” as they define themselves in the film.

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