Night Is Not Eternal

Chinese-born and U.S.-based filmmaker Nanfu Wang has made a career out of crafting documentaries that speak to the difficulty in creating full-throated responses, reactions, and resistance to autocratic and authoritarian regimes. In her latest, Night is Not Eternal, she is ostensibly profiling Rosa María Payá Acevedo, a Cuban activist with whom Wang feels a kinship, the two of them having grown up in countries where dissent and freedoms were similarly quelled. Yet as Wang follows Payá Acevedo through the first Trump administration as well as the 2020 election and its aftermath, the ideological schisms between the two grow wider and wider. Looking at the thorny promise of cross-national solidarity, Wang’s documentary examines the concessions individuals like Payá Acevedo (who’s all too happy to appear at Trump rallies to bolster support for the plight of Cubans) make in the quest for the ever obfuscating concepts of “freedom” and “democracy” around the globe. For deftly capturing how resistance movements are thwarted and how fickle ideological allegiances can be when they are solely politically motivated, Night is Not Eternal wins a Peabody award.