From Dawn To Dawn

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Visions du Réel, Xisi Sofia Ye Chen’s From Dawn To Dawn is a family portrait shaped by distance, debt, exile and the stubborn possibility of repair. The Spanish-born director’s feature debut begins in a Chinese monastery near the place where her brother A Wen was born, before tracing the long arc that brought their parents to Spain and, years later, brought him into a life marked by gangs, gambling, loan sharks and disappearances. Yet Chen is not interested in turning her brother into a cautionary tale. Her approach is less exposé than the act of listening.

Chen narrates the piece herself, and that voice is crucial. She has the instincts of a poet and the discipline of a storyteller, guiding us through A Wen’s life with an intimacy that never tips into extraction. Her narration creates the feeling of being gathered around a fire, listening to stories of mistakes made, lives rerouted and forgiveness that was never bartered, only quietly assumed. The family’s pain is present, but so is a tenderness that makes blame feel too small a language for what has happened between them.

A Wen’s past is rendered in fragments, from his parents opening a shop in Barcelona to neighboring aunties gossiping about debts and loan sharks, cousins and acquaintances speaking of gambling dens, old gang allegiances and international warrants with a startling casualness. Yet these details do not become character-defining revelations so much as nooks in a life path, part of a history that Chen approaches with curiosity rather than judgment. By the time we meet him, A Wen has remade himself as a businessman running restaurants, a man whose second life is built on the effort to outgrow the first. His visits to monks extend that sense of restless self-revision in an attempt to find a way of living without being trapped by the old stories.

Food and smoke recur as motifs. Steam from freshly cooked meals drifts through scenes of family gathering, while cigarette smoke hangs around conversations about reinvention and getting one’s life straight. Former gang members talk about helping others leave that world behind, not as saints but as men who understand how difficult normal life can be once chaos has become a habit. The great theme here is rehabilitation, not the clean institutional kind, but the messy, informal, familial kind, built out of meals, phone calls, silence, guilt and second chances.

That silence becomes one of Chen’s most haunting subjects. Speaking of her brother’s refusal or inability to discuss his old life, she describes it as something that spreads “like a virus,” turning everyone into one body hidden in warehouses and basements, buried with its stories. It is one of the strongest passages because it expands A Wen’s history into a larger immigrant condition, lives lived on the edges of official narrative, full of labour, sacrifice and secrecy, leaving little trace behind.

From Dawn To Dawn also brings a distinctive Chinese-Spanish immigrant history to the screen, quietly shattering the lazy assumption that certain migrant communities belong only to certain parts of the West. Chen’s parents arrived in Europe in the 1990s, in pursuit of a future her mother could barely locate on a map. Her birth in 1996 becomes, in retrospect, one of immigration’s accidental miracles, a life that likely would not have existed under China’s one-child policy. Yet the cost is never sentimentalised. Her parents worked punishingly hard to create possibilities for their children, “all of that,” as Chen notes, for their daughter to write in a language they will never understand.

Chen does not dissect every corner of A Wen’s life, and that restraint matters. Many personal non-fiction features mistake intimacy for access, but here the unrevealed remains part of the truth. Even the three titles suggest different emotional registers, the Spanish La Noche De La Infancia, meaning The Night of Childhood, the English From Dawn To Dawn, and the Chinese title, meaning Last Night’s Song.. Rather than collapsing these meanings into one, Chen lets them coexist. Her debut meets its different audiences in different languages, while holding onto the same wounded, generous heart.

Reviewed on: 01 May 2026