If you’ve watched a lot of political documentaries, especially those that deal with American politics, I think you’ll agree with me on this: Many, if not most, are overly simplistic. It’s just hard to explain the current social and cultural moment, or adequately chronicle the rise of a controversial figure, in a couple of hours. Most often I find they fall along ideological lines with easy answers, rarely challenging partisan orthodoxies or prodding the viewer into new mental territory.
“Night Is Not Eternal” (streaming on Max) is not one of those films. The movie’s director, Nanfu Wang, has spent her career making truly provocative documentaries, often about her homeland of China. Her first feature, “Hooligan Sparrow,” about Chinese human rights activists, resulted in Wang herself being surveilled by the government. In “One Child Nation,” she explored the ramifications of China’s one-child policy. “In the Same Breath,” about governmental response to the start of the Covid-19 pandemic both in Wuhan and in the United States, finds uncomfortable similarities between the two.
Wang’s films often blend personal experience with broader political and social critique, and her newest does the same. Wang emigrated to the United States in 2011, and her political perspective is informed by firsthand experience of both Chinese and American public rhetoric. That lends an outside-the-box point of view to “Night Is Not Eternal,” which on its face is a film about the Cuban activist Rosa María Payá, whom Wang met at a film festival years ago. Payá’s father, the anti-authoritarian activist Oswaldo Payá, died in 2012 in a suspicious car crash, declared by official Cuban state TV to be an accident (an account later refuted by a report from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights). His daughter took up his fight as her own.
Wang explains that after she and Payá met at the festival, they talked extensively about their similar experiences growing up under authoritarian governments — Wang in China, Payá in Cuba. As her friend became more prominent in her fight against the Cuban authoritarian regime, Wang became more curious about their parallels, and decided to make a movie about it.
All of this seems fairly straightforward, at first. But things take a seemingly sharp turn mid-movie, when Wang spots Payá on TV — in the front row at a Trump rally. This doesn’t fit Wang’s idea of what Payá supports. With determined, open curiosity, she starts trying to figure it out. From there, “Night Is Not Eternal” blooms into something unexpected: an exploration of the ways that immigrants from countries where authoritarian rule is the norm interact with American politics, often in ways that baffle pundits.
Wang’s great skill is holding ideas and ideologies at arm’s length. Here, she looks at assumptions that she and others make about people’s loyalties as well as how certain phrases and buzzwords (such as communism) are wielded by politicians and governments for specific purposes, sometimes disconnected from their meanings. Her perspective evolves throughout the film, and she’s clear and honest about what that means for her own life.
“Night Is Not Eternal” ends, brilliantly, with a meditation on what optimism and activism can mean for those who live in autocracies and restrictive societies. But equally remarkable is what Wang has pulled off with this film. It’s the rare truly nuanced political documentary that is likely to challenge every viewer’s perspective — not because it tries to see all sides of an issue and leaves the viewer suspended in confusion, but because its point of view feels radically outside of convention, beholden to no one.
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