In “Night is Not Eternal”, Nanfu Wang connects her cinematic activism in China with the activism of Rosa Maria Paya Rosa who shot Wang twice in Cuba. But her connection is not incidental, but quite political. It is not only the country where Wang created her film that can be referred to as an authoritarian regime, but also where fascism creeps in, Wang notes. Over the past ten years, Wang made all of her films with a craving to “uncover the systems at work”, which Wang explains when asked about Rosa Maria Paya’s similarities with Cuban and Chinense together.
Wang narrates the story of people who would never give up freedom, but were only left with sandstones as “patience” and as it now seems to Wang, politically twisting propaganda suggests portrayal as impossible to compensate for the hopelessness which is derived as a gamble. A good accent is made on how long Paya and Acevedo struggled against the system, which she felt invalid when winning an election as she wished that what Rodriguez always mentioned had been real, that is the day when change is ushered into the country.
This excerpt is almost a paranoid thriller as Acevedo, her fellow activists, and Wang are stalked by mysterious people in suspicious vehicles. Acevedo is however compelled to focus on policy work and engaging with major global players when it is determined on-ground measures are too risky.
The views of the United States like that of Wang during the Trumps first term saw significant changes as she gave birth to Wang’s first child in 2017. “I came to America because there was the hope for democracy and freedom but then I saw the country was hostile to people like my son,” she argues in response adding how narratively self-reflective she knows such comment can sound. The documentary “One Child Nation” was Wang’s love letter to the People’s Republic of China that she produced in the cinema of her parent country. Acevedo’s imaginations of the child nation with her own eyes painted an intimidating picture. Wang actively participated in making another documentary titled “In the Same Breath,” during the pandemic exploring how states responded to the outbreak of COVID-19. Subsequently, she saw Acevedo in the same space in Florida tours alongside Trump but this time around had more to say.
Nonetheless, her responses add to what she has said about the consequences of meshing activism with the politics and diplomacy in the section where they set interview goals.
Wang then examines the bewildering variations that exist between Acevedo and her. Even Attempts to Understanding China filmmaker accuses communism or socialism for the vast inequality she witnessed within China. On the other hand, after witnessing it in adulthood, it was like being told that this was a socialist country, only to then realize that it was just a cover for pure capitalism that was full of: preservation of wealth, worker exploitation and the indiscriminate greed of profit during people’s reign. This is where Wang skillfully illustrates the real picture. She shows that the relationship between China and the U.S. is much deeper than either will care to acknowledge and that both use patriotism in order to insist on unwarranted nationalistic pride.
The last part of the documentary revolves around analyzing and contrasting the events surrounding the Cuban protests during July 2021 with the Tiananmen square protests which occurred in China in 1989. Both kinds of protests had youth at the helm, and at the time, both countries seemed to be teetering on the edge of democracy but were met with equally harsh violence by their governments and the opposition.
Unlimited coverage of the events that played in Cuba where they were heavily opposed in China during 19889 were studied more thoroughly in the documentary by Wang. Any form of coverage in these places was highly disallowed and so only one side of the event was presented theirs. Wang, who was three during these incidents, was unable to access any cellular footage of these events in China. In today’s world, however the fires of these events are still ablaze as they remain relevant even today.
Though Wang’s work is quite information dense, by the remainder of the movie one feels like they have sufficient knowledge on what caused these events. In the words of Wang “change is gradual it’s deeply embedded within history.” Though knowledge is critical during these times, hope is what fuels change. Wang further reminds me that even in works such as “Night Is Not Eternal” there isn’t a linear timeline to define ‘starting’ work, highlighting the difference in vice and footage oppression in the US and Cuba.
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