Beatrice Gibson’s debut feature, ‘At Night’, premiered in Locarno’s Filmmakers of the Present programme on 8 August. Set across one night in Paris, it follows six women whose stories intersect, using poetry and a blend of dream, fiction and reality to examine motherhood, womanhood, class and race.

The film draws on Alice Notley’s feminist epic ‘The Descent of Alette’ and Kathy Acker’s ‘Don Quixote’, with poems used in performances, voiceovers and recordings to connect characters. Its central relationship is between Bea, a successful white artist played by Gibson, and Didi, a Black single mother in emergency housing, whose strained history exposes unequal power and privilege. Gibson calls the work “collective autofiction” and presents it as an unresolved question rather than a story with simple answers.