It is Night in America

Ana Vaz / , & / 2022

The wild animals head for the cities to avoid extinction. Are they the ones invading us? Or is it us who have invaded and occupied their natural habitat? Ana Vaz’s eco-horror film documents a huge and mostly invisible migration that dissolves the imaginary boundaries between the authenticity of nature and the man-made world. Invisible because – at least in Vaz’s visionary interpretation – it takes place in the cinematic twilight known as ‘day for night’: an artificial darkness conjured by a blue filter in front of the camera lens. ‘It is Night in America’ is a cinematic work so rich in ideas that even the subtitles are integrated into the process of conceptualising the ecological crisis we live in the midst of – and in the process of deconstructing a few old, false notions along the way.