The Night Is Dark And Colder Than The Day

****

Reviewed by: Jennie Kermode

The Night Is Dark And Colder Than The Day
"Navigating fears, dreams and dark imaginings, it has a folkloric depth to it even as it seems acutely relevant to the present, to our changing world."

In 2021, Pietro Marcello, Francesco Munzi and Alice Rohrwacher made Futura, a documentary in which young Italians discuss their feelings and philosophies, their ambitions and their thoughts about the future. Christina Friedrich’s The Night Is Dark And Colder Than The Day, which premièred at the 2025 Rotterdam International Film Festival, takes a similar approach with younger German children, but is tonally very different. Navigating fears, dreams and dark imaginings, it has a folkloric depth to it even as it seems acutely relevant to the present, to our changing world.

The film was very much driven by the children themselves. Having appeared in her previous work, Zone, they were keen to make something of their own. It’s not clear quite how much fact has been tinged with fiction, but the ideas are the children’s own, and this adds to the sense of strangeness about it. No effort is made to connect with adult perspectives. The different values of childhood, the different ways in which ordinary activities are framed, serve as a reminder that the world can be subject to very different forms of understanding. They contribute to the sense of a generational voice framed in part by age but also by the different issues that these children are facing as they grow up.

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We begin in a school hall where they take it in turns to reveal their phobias. Some of these are fairly commonplace – heights, spiders, the dark – but still, it’s a brave thing to reveal such vulnerability at that stage in life, when peers often mercilessly exploit it. There is a deep trust between these children. Perhaps it’s a legacy of Covid-19 that several talk about their fear of the death of loved ones, but there are plainly wider social concerns. One is afraid of becoming homeless, another of World War Three. One talks about his fear of committing acts of self harm during sleep paralysis, whilst another fears madness that might lead to suicide. This isn’t the sort of thing most of us are used to hearing from children. It’s a strikingly honest conversation, one which also requires a bit of courage from adult viewers.

One of the girls is troubled by a frequent dream of falling into a dark hole. Before we know it, the children are making their way through a passageway which much resembles this. As we are treated to the Grimm tale The Youth Who Went Forth To Find Out What Fear Was, we watch them make their way to a castle where they fall asleep as if under a spell. It’s here that discussion of dreams gives way to them being acted out. Several talk about wanting to be able to transform into animals, and are costumed accordingly, moving through nearby countryside, expressing their nature in a form of loosely choreographed dance. One girl wants to be a shapeshifter. A boy wants to have special powers like Spider-man. Another wants to live in the Permian period, with dinosaurs, and acquires a kind of ritual mask.

There are many forms of ritual to be seen here, not necessarily drawing on anything ancient, but forming spontaneously as they can easily do when children’s imaginations come together. A girl’s solitary dance beside a tree, straining up towards the sky, feels like something far more fundamental, more real than the majority of things with which adults concern themselves. The children’s rootedness in nature may be a product of the circumstances in which they’ve grown up or may reflect generational concerns.

There is talk of the Teumesse fox, a creature once said to prey on children, though here it seems to be valued more because it is uncatchable. A current of wildness underlies everything. The adult world barely seems relevant; it is slipping rapidly into the past. Together the children construct a new reality.

“I think that the world will soon change,” says one.

Reviewed on: 04 Feb 2025
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Between sleeping, waking and dreaming, we experience a collective dream of children who seem to be alone in this world – alone with universal questions and fears for which they must find their own answers.

Director: Christina Friedrich

Writer: Christina Friedrich

Starring: Celina Mund, Lee Becker, Lukas Burghardt, Diana Braun, Diana Siebert, Stella Deede, Elias Schönberger, Azra Canli, Juljana Siewert, Niklas Eisensee

Year: 2024

Runtime: 83 minutes

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