In Nuit obscure – “Ain’t I a child?”, Sylvain George wields cinema as a political gesture and poetic act, confronting the brutal realities of migration through a lens of resistance and reimagining. We had the pleasure of meeting him at the 78th Cannes Film Festival.
French director Sylvain George is very vocal and passionate about the issue of migration, and it is heartfelt, especially when he speaks about it. We met up with this acclaimed filmmaker at ACID (an association of film directors which, since 1992, has been promoting the cinema distribution of independent films and encouraging debates between authors and audiences) at the Cannes Film Festival 2025, to talk about his film, Nuit obscure – “Ain’t I a child?” (Obscure Night – “Ain’t I a child?”)
He has directed and produced numerous films about the status of undocumented immigrants who navigate a Europe mostly surrounded by conflicts from racist border policies, police militarization, etc.
In his latest film, the final film in his Obscure Night trilogy, George follows young exiles through the nights of Paris, whom he befriended in Melilla, a Spanish outpost on the Moroccan coast, where youth from throughout North Africa gather in the hope of crossing into Europe.
“In my work as a filmmaker, I’ve long been drawn to the interplay of image, movement, and resistance. Cinema, for me, is not merely a storytelling device. It is a tool to excavate, to question, to confront. And nowhere is this more urgent than in the context of migration — not as a theme, but as a lens through which we understand the world, its violences, and its acts of defiance,” he explains.
Obscure Night traces the path of young exiles through the nights of Paris. It sketches youth as a power of being, and brings forth, through silence and duration, other ways of inhabiting the world, shot in black and white.
Much of the trilogy is filmed in black and white, not for nostalgia or aesthetic flair, but as a formal decision — a way to create distance, to disrupt familiar representations. Black and white images carve space away from the conventions of humanitarian visuality, away from compassion narratives that depoliticize suffering.
There is colour too, using archival footage from a young man’s mobile phone as he crosses the Mediterranean. “These images are raw, fragmented, overexposed. I manipulated the red saturation to heighten the emotional voltage. It’s a rupture, a visceral point of entry. The transition to black and white that follows is stark. It’s a descent, or perhaps a confrontation. I see this contrast as a gesture in itself — from the saturated chaos of escape to the austere daily survival in Parisian streets. It’s not a linear progression, but a circular one, where histories echo and realities fold onto each other.”
“The film in question is the third part of what has become a loosely connected trilogy. While each film stands independently, they resonate with one another politically, aesthetically, and emotionally. Together, they chart trajectories that begin on the peripheries of Europe and drift into its guarded heart.” He adds that the title Obscure Night is both homage and inversion. Borrowed from Dark Night of the Soul by Saint John of the Cross, a Spanish mystic and poet, the phrase originally evokes a sacred journey of spiritual awakening. “In my film, it becomes something else: a meditation on geopolitical darkness. The night here is not merely symbolic; it is literal. It is patrolled, surveilled, and weaponized — a zone of control and abandonment. I was drawn to the paradox of this noble title framing the lived reality of those systematically ignored — the undocumented, the displaced, the youth of Morocco’s lowest classes. They are not saints in exile. They are people in flight, in pause, in confrontation with systems designed to erase them.”
He further elucidates, “From the beginning, I intended to explore not just the subject of migration, but the cinematic form itself. I do not work with scripts, characters, or traditional narrative arcs. There are no auditions. The approach is rooted in presence, in being with, rather than looking at. That’s why I resist categorizing the work as documentary or fiction. These labels flatten what cinema can do. In my films, the real bleeds into the constructed. What matters is the gesture, the resonance, the moment a body crosses a border or a gaze meets the camera. Jean-Luc Godard, whose work I deeply admire, often erased that line between documentary and fiction. Cinema, for him — as for me — is an act of political and poetic intervention.”
Talking about the film’s protagonists, George says they are not subjects. “They are collaborators. I met them in Melilla, a colonial vestige at the edge of Europe — a place saturated with the legacies of Franco, Spanish imperialism, and contemporary border militarization. Melilla is not just a crossing point; it is a laboratory where Europe experiments with the outsourcing of its migration control.” He further adds, “In the forest outside the city, I met children, teenagers, young men living in limbo, in makeshift camps, waiting, calculating, resisting. These same individuals appear across the trilogy. In the third part, I find them again — this time in Paris — revealing not only their journey but also the ghostly continuity between the colonial margins and the imperial centre.”
“Why do I return, again and again, to migration? Because it concerns us all. Migration policy is not about migrants. It is about the organization of power, space, and life. It is about surveillance, borders, violence — and how these are tested, resisted, reimagined.”
He adds that cinema must not moralize. “I do not seek pity for those I film. That only reproduces the structures I aim to critique. Instead, I seek to render visible the gestures of refusal — the lighting of a fire in the night, the leap over a fence, the glance over a shoulder. These are not mere survival tactics; they are acts of political imagination.”
Our reporters are on the ground in Cannes, France, to bring you exclusive content from the 78th Cannes Film Festival—explore our coverage here.
