CM 2024

BBC Film

La nuit

Current Status &amp; Goals at CineMartLa nuit has been carefully developed with funding from BBC Film for the past two years. The script has been developed with a cast of diverse contemporaries, largely women and non-binary people; educators, psychotherapists, writers, artists, musicians, and poets. All of these people will play versions of themselves. This project is a co-production between Somesuch (UK) and Norte Productions (France). As a result of this, we will benefit from a UK tax relief and have pending applications for multiple French public funds. BBC Film will to continue supporting this project as a funding partner and has committed &pound;650,000 towards the production finance. Whilst we have a strong strategy via these various funding initiatives, they cannot solely finance this film. We are looking to engage a minority co-producer or investor to come on board at this stage.&nbsp;SynopsisAfter an abortion, a woman wanders the streets, embarking on a series of quiet encounters under a neon glow. Taking place over the course of a single night and drawing on the writings of cult literary figures Kathy Acker, Bernadette Mayer and Alice Notley, Beatrice Gibson&rsquo;s debut feature collapses dream and reality, liquefying both. Experiencing a feeling of freedom post her abortion, the film&rsquo;s protagonist drifts aimlessly through the city at night. Radicalised by the birth of daughter and her experiences of racism in the French welfare system she contemplates returning to Bamako, her parents&rsquo; home. We follow her through a series of locations, observing as she encounters an array of characters traversing the city; a fringe community from filmakers, artists, poets, and performers to night labourers, sex workers, waiters, cleaners and nocturnal animals. They find and sustain each other by chance &ndash; in bars, nail salons, petrol stations, gaming arcades. They discuss, love, sex, money, race and class. One woman can&rsquo;t stop having affairs, one is writing a novel, another cleans houses. One is trying for a baby, another&rsquo;s mother can&rsquo;t remember who she is anymore. Around them, sirens wail &ndash; a world in turmoil spins on its axis. As dream replaces reality a second woman&rsquo;s journey mirror&rsquo;s the first, a third and a fourth also bear resemblance. Repetitions and connections punctuate the night, rendering it uncanny, hallucinatory. La nuit is a post-gender epic, a collectively written story about the journeys we undertake, the relentless decisions we face. A tale about love, grief and nocturnal wandering, as told by a series of minor characters in a series of minor quotidian moments, nonetheless steeped in a vertiginous magic. A story about love in the apocalypse. &nbsp;Director's BiographyBeatrice Gibson lives and works between Palermo, Sicily, and London UK. Gibson is twice winner of the Tiger Award for Best Short Film, International Film Festival Rotterdam, (2009/2013) winner of the 2015 Baloise Art Prize, Art Basel and the Images Festival Marian McMahon Akimbo Award for Autobiography, 2019. In 2013, she was nominated for the Max Mara Prize for Women artists and in 2013 and 2019 respectively for the Jarman Award for Artist&rsquo;s film. Gibson&rsquo;s films have shown at film festivals around the world, including at New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, London Film Festival, Courtisane Film Festival, Punto De Vista International Documentary Film Festival and many more. Her films have been the subject of numerous screenings at The Institute Of Contemporary Art, Tate Modern, Tate Britain, The Whitechapel Gallery, The Serpentine Gallery, The Pompidou Centre, SCHIRN Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, The Art Institute of Chicago and many more. She has recently had solo exhibitions at Camden Arts Centre, London, Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen, Mercer Union, Toronto (2019), KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, (2018). She has upcoming Shows at British Art Show 9, Ordet, Milan and Macro Roma. Gibson&rsquo;s latest film premiered at Directors Fortnight, Cannes Film Festival 2019.

Somesuch

After an abortion, a woman wanders the streets, embarking on a series of quiet encounters under a neon glow. Taking place over the course of a single night and drawing on the writings of cult literary figures Kathy Acker, Bernadette Mayer and Alice Notley. Beatrice Gibson's first feature collapses dream and reality, liquefying both.