Night for Day

Night for Day sets out with a fake mother-son relationship between three real people living in contemporary Lisbon. The ‘mother’ is Isabel do Carmo, who co-ran the Revolutionary Brigades in Portugal that helped to overthrow the longest fascist dictatorship in Europe, and the ‘sons’ are two young men, Alexander Bridi and Djelal Osman–astrophysicists running a start-up in Lisbon that attempts to programme computers to recognise moving images. The film collages a subjectivity from fragments of cameras struggling to see at night, of presences out in the cold watching families inside their homes, and images that attempt to describe a loved one in frequencies of three. Their imaginary house is the real family home of the architect António Teixeira Guerra, finished just before 1974, designed in the shape of a triangle and shot at the time he always chose to invite guests–the magic hour. (Berlinale)