The film is based on Christopher Dewdney's e-book, Acquainted with the Night: Excursions thru the World after Dark. While Dewdney breaks up the night time into hourly vignettes based totally on technological know-how, delusion and poetry, McNamara proceeds in a different way, showcasing key segments of time: daylight preparations, dusk, night-time activities, dawn and its aftermath.
In the film's Prelude, people in a diversity of cultures and stations in lifestyles are proven preparing for darkness, foreshadowing what the night embodies for them:
• In the metropolis of Atzompa, in the southern Mexican country of Oaxaca, a family walks alongside a dirt street with a wheelbarrow and fingers complete of vegetation, destined for the cemetery, the beginning of its Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) rituals;
• Members of Astronomers Without Borders line up telescopes in Bhaktapur, Nepal, for viewing Jupiter and its moons;
• A group of researchers arrive at Arches National Park in Utah, to measure light pollutants;
• On the Greek Island of Chios, villagers from two rival towns equipped rockets and launching pads in training for a century - old, middle-of-the-night pyrotechnics competition;
• A institution sets up excessive - strength lamps in New York City near Ground Zero, for a tribute in lighting;
• Artists at Parc des Buttes Chaumant in Paris, France, install their art, and lights, for Nuit Blanche, a completely unique exhibition.
Introductions retain through Dusk, in Austin, Texas. Crowds collect earlier than darkish, keen to watch 1.5 million bats fly out from under a spread bridge in a night time-time feeding frenzy. This yr the bats emerge abruptly early, but the movie group, at the ready, does not omit a beat and catches the occasion as it happens.
Moving into The Night, we are whisked worlds away, to a market in Marrakech, Morocco. Children and adults alike are enthralled with the aid of the tales of a traditional storyteller, certainly one of most effective two or three of his kind closing. But storytelling is prevalent, as McNamara illustrates, taking the viewer from this Moroccan custom to Anglo- and French-Canadian houses in Canada where dad and mom read the equal mattress-time story to their kids, Love You Forever, in English and in French.
McNamara uses his characters, in preference to a narrator, to string his theses. Researcher Chad Moore, measuring mild pollution with state-of-the-art gadgets, decries the loss of the ability of Americans to witness genuine darkness. It "ties all and sundry collectively across the planet," states Moore. "We must decide if it is well worth saving," he asks rhetorically. Then in Nepal, as though to answer the question, we're positioned amongst astronomers encouraging onlookers to take a height at the largest planet inside the sun device. Curiosity, intrigue, marvel and the hunt to study the night, every transcends tradition and age.
Returning to North America, and The Night Shift, a protracted-haul trucker drives throughout Canada with her son, after dark, exposing us to the night time's working world - its attraction, its danger, and its necessity. At the Sleep and Alertness Clinic in Toronto we analyze of the afflictions which beset the night time shift, and are told of current-day failures that have took place at some stage in the center-of-the-night because of human mistakes - Chernobyl and Exxon Valdez are noted examples. If humanity ought to paintings in the course of the night, as is suggested, how do we better adapt?
The darkish facet of earth's maximum densely populated club district is discovered, underneath the watch of Toronto Police Department's 52 Division. Another element of night shift paintings: patrolling nightly, and then rounding up particularly youthful revelers as they emerge from partying shortly after 2 a.M., excessive on pills or a bit an excessive amount of to drink, in both case ensuing in unruly behavior or violence. Detention and in some instances arrest follows; then subsequently the morning clean-up, Night's Last Stand.
McNamara also illustrates how in another way demise is approached relying on societal mores. In the candle - lit Mexican cemetery his cinematographers seize the poignancy of an aged couple lamenting the loss of their son, decades after his passing. He then switches to the somber spectacle of mild close to Ground Zero. On a subsequent night in the Mexican village, death is remembered not thru solemnity, however now with comparsas - parades marked by using reveling in costume, dance and song. McNamara then takes us to the pageantry of a Winter Solstice party at Toronto's Kensington Market. The night time is a catalyst for celebrating in comparable, almost equal fashion, underneath dramatically distinct circumstances.
Particularly hanging and notion-provoking contrasts arise within the context of McNamara taking us to a makeshift outside hockey rink illuminated through the total moon, then to beyond Yellowknife, wherein The Dene, one in all Canada's First Nation peoples, emerge from their teepees rejoicing the awe-inspiring Aurora Borealis, and sure, telling stories. Cut to Paris, wherein artificial light offers art a brand new appreciation, then to New York, where mild pays homage to America's fallen. It's difficult to remedy the battle between utilizing and appreciating the night time and all its marvel and splendor - a reason for its maintenance - and possibly simply as valid, transforming and celebrating the night, which results in its adulteration.
As dawn techniques, heaps of spent rockets are accrued at the Greek island, the Parisian artwork exhibit has lost its glimmer, the 9 / 11 lighting fixtures are extinguished, the now exhausted Nepalese storyteller heads home, and the villagers of Atzompa leave via the cemetery arch, until next yr's Dia de los Muertos.
Acquainted with the Night takes the viewer on a lot more than a go-cultural journey traversing the amazing and the acquainted, after which returned again. It opens our minds to a sampling of what maximum of us miss among going to bed, and bobbing up for paintings the following day. It necessarily encourages many to re-examine an unnecessarily staid way of life, through inspecting a global no longer previously recognised to exist. It ensures that we expose our young people to more, yet at the identical time cautions, and increases questions - with solutions tough to reconcile.
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