Black Night

A permanent darkness has covered the world and there is no longer any such thing as day. In that world, an entomologist tightly bound to his routine decides to leave his phantoms behind and move towards something he does not know. Olivier Smolders’ only feature film is built not as a straight story but as a nightmare broken into pieces, feeding off the narrative model of the Surrealists. Smolders had been making short films since the mid-eighties, and here he brings his own obsessions together: insects, human skin and religious imagery. That he was born in the Congo is the source of the film’s African imagery. It is a film of sensation rather than narrative, one where image and sound do the work on their own. Even in Belgium it had a very limited release.