Dark Night of the Body: Sylvain George’s Obscure Night Trilogy Uncovers Immigration Experiences

Encountering Sylvain George’s Obscure Night - Goodbye Here, Anywhere (2023) at the Locarno Film Festival two years ago was a revelation. The three-hour-long black-and-white documentary screened at the end of one of the festival’s final days. Given the exhaustion I felt going in, the question on my mind was whether I would make it through without drifting off. Three hours later, I left the cinema markedly more alert than when I had entered it. Goodbye Here, the second installment of the Obscure Night trilogy, follows a group of Moroccan teenagers in Melilla, an autonomous Spanish city in North Africa, which serves as an immigration buffer zone between Africa and Europe. Obscure Night, which also includes 2022’s Wild Leaves (The Burning Ones, the Obstinate) and “Ain’t I a Child?” (2025), offers a 10-hour-long exploration that is as much about place as it is about displacement.

George, whose films have examined Europe’s draconian immigration policies and the crises induced by them since 2005, has centered his films around three main locations: Paris, Calais, and Melilla, making several films in each city. His documentaries, equal parts playful and austere, display a special cinematographic sensitivity which emerges not only from the striking monochrome photography or precise tempo of editing, but through a treatment which balances the subjective experiences of individuals within the film with the objective conditions imposed upon them by impersonal systems and policies. What distinguishes George’s work from other immigration-centered documentaries is a sensitivity towards the dialectics of the place and the displaced; the interaction of inflexible laws designed to confine, and tenacious wills bent on breaking from confinement. 

The lamentable scarcity of publicity and screenings of George’s work outside of the festival circuit was remedied, if only slightly, by the belated UK Premiere of Goodbye Here in April 2025 at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), which screened alongside Vers Madrid - The Burning Bright (2012) and several shorts by George, and a retrospective across several theaters in the Bay Area from April 27–30. This interview has been edited.

DOCUMENTARY: Your films often have recurring locations. For instance, your most recent works, The Obscure Night trilogy, are set in Melilla. How did you first come across the city? 

SYLVAIN GEORGE: I first heard about Melilla, one of the last remaining Spanish (and European) colonies, in 2005, before I’d made any films. This was when close to 1,500 Moroccans attempted to cross the border into Melilla by jumping over the barbed wire, which resulted in around seven people being shot and killed by the border forces. Since I was already interested in making a film about European immigration policies, I went to Melilla and spoke with some activists and locals living in the surrounding forests about the situation. Eventually, I realized that I needed more money and time than I had anticipated to realize this project. I returned to France, applied for funding, and made some short films in the meantime that also addressed immigration. 

D: Is that when you went to Calais, another city where you made several films?

SG: Once I received the funding, it still wasn’t enough to realize the project in Melilla. Instead, I decided to go to Calais, which was a hotbed of immigration activism and refugees in France. I wasn’t convinced about the representation of these people and the situation in Calais in news reports. So, I started to work on some projects there and ended up making two features and around ten short films in three years. 

D: When did you resume working on the Melilla project? 

SG: In 2012, I finally started to write the project that became Obscure Night. But the same issue slowed us again: funding! Securing money for this type of film is like going to war! It took us another three years to search for funds, during which time I also made Vers Madrid - The Burning Bright (2011–2014). By 2015, when we finally had most of the money and were waiting for one last grant, I returned to Melilla to shoot some footage on my own. 

D: Is this around the time when you made Paris is a Moveable Feast - A Film in 18 Waves (2017)?

SG: When I was ready to shoot in Melilla, I received a proposal from the Centre Pompidou to create a series of short films for them, which eventually became a feature: Paris is a Moveable Feast. This interval also allowed us to finally gather all the necessary funds for Obscure Night after six years! In 2018, I returned to Melilla to resume the project once again. 

To return to your question about my interest in these places, I would say that I went to Calais because it is a place that was talked about in France, a dialectical place where not only the bodies of the exiled are exposed, but also the public policies enforced by successive governments. I wanted to begin my work on European migration policies by viewing Calais as an emblematic site, which was further confirmed during my stay there. Calais, like certain French suburbs, is a gray area where the law is suspended, where certain rights are not respected, and where police practices are tested that will extend to the broader population (such as what we witnessed with the Yellow Vests movement). 

With Melilla, I was more interested in the externalization of European policies, particularly how they utilize the spaces of the South to regulate immigration flows toward Europe, in line with their postcolonial policies.

D: Not only is there a persistent investigation of space in your films, but also of time. For instance, in Wild Leaves, we see a military march in the streets, and in Goodbye Here, Anywhere, there is a hologram of a historical soldier inside the city fortress. These are powerful reminders of the relatively unchanged forms of state oppression over several hundred years. When we see the European inhabitants clapping for the military parade, there’s no trace of the refugees anymore; they are compelled to stay out of sight as the state flexes its muscles. 

SG: The first part of the Obscure Night trilogy, Wild Leaves (The Burning Ones, the Obstinate) (2022), engages more directly with the notion of location. I present what I refer to as the geography of control, juxtaposed with the geography of desire, of the exiled. There’s also a greater variety in the spaces in this part: sometimes we are in Melilla and at other times near the Moroccan border, while always foregrounding and contrasting the city's colonial history with its postcolonial present. For instance, Franco’s statue stands at the entry of the port, as this is the town from which he rose to power during the Spanish Civil War. Additionally, you can see a building that was Franco’s house in Goodbye Here, Anywhere (2023). The intention was to depict Melilla as a palimpsest, a colonial town from the 16th century layered with traces of time and history. This second film focuses more on children and teenagers. I didn’t want to showcase the entire town again as I had in the first film, but rather to present it through the gestures and movements of the teenagers. In the third part, “Ain’t I a Child?” (2025), you’ll see these young characters in Paris. 

D: I appreciate that you’re not interested in simply presenting a report on the situation, but rather in a cinematic interpretation that considers both the various present subjectivities and the objective situation. 

SG: It’s not about illustrating some political ideas about immigration, but about discovering how these immigration policies coincide with the experiences of the subjects. In other words, it’s not so much a film “about” the subjects, but a film that uncovers European immigration policies through their experiences. At the same time, my approach is not to give the camera to the people in the documentary or cosign the film with them, which is something that other filmmakers have done, perhaps because that’s almost an easier position to take within such a complicated situation. I follow people in transit who are confronting immigration policies at different levels. What’s fascinating to me is that you learn different things about these policies from the adults (in Wild Leaves), versus the teenagers (in Goodbye Here, Anywhere), and something different again from the children (in “Ain’t I a Child?”), because they all react differently to similar circumstances. 

D: You also adjust your approach in how you film and represent not only the characters, but also space and time?

SG: Cinema provides us with a set of tools to present these varied experiences: the choice of point of view, framing, exposure, texture, darkness, and light, etc. For instance, there are different kinds of darkness, of obscurity. There is the night of the control, the biopolitical night (which Michel Foucault wrote about), or the insurrectionary night (which Jacques Rancière wrote about in Proletarian Nights). Night is the time when we observe gestures of insurrection, such as when teenagers play with the rules by climbing the fence, playing with the border, and the devices responsible for translating and enforcing migration policy.  Suddenly, a space of emancipation emerges through a gesture capable of dismantling the dominant reality and defining another plane of immanence. Sometimes, just an image of a head against the light becomes a way to play with this notion of obscurity, as well as desacralization of life and iconology.

D: To conclude with this notion of various obscurities, where does the title Obscure Night originate from?

SG: It comes from a religious Spanish poem by St. John of the Cross entitled La Noche Oscura (Dark Night of the Soul). It's a mystic text that explores the doubts and desires associated with God. I employed a form of dialectical and carnivalesque inversion of this title: not a text about the sacred, but rather one about the ambivalence of the sacred (what is deemed sacred can also be sacrificed) and the emphasis on the profane, particularly what I term "profane childhood," about criminalized people and sacrificed children. It also addresses gestures, often very simple ones, such as the teenagers laughing in front of the security apparatus, which suddenly undermines the entire ideology upon which that apparatus rests, revealing an alternative way of inhabiting the world in the process.

Arta Barzanji is a London-based Iranian filmmaker, critic, and programmer. His current film project is the documentary Unfinished: Kamran Shirdel. Arta is an alumnus of the critic programmes at the Locarno and Ghent film festivals and has written for outlets including MUBI Notebook, Sabzian, and Cineaste Magazine.