The Night Is Fading Away: A Cinema Becomes a Refuge in Argentina

A film projectionist named Pelu, played by Octavio Bertone, loses his job to budget cuts and secretly moves into the cinema where he works. That is the premise of The Night Is Fading Away, the new film by Ramiro Sonzini and Ezequiel Salinas, set in a single-screen theatre in the Argentine city of Córdoba. The Guardian's review describes it as a "hypnotic homage to cinema as a force for public good."

The film arrives after Javier Milei's election ushered in an era of far-right conservatism in Argentina, and the local cinema becomes a refuge in response. What does this change for the people on screen? For Pelu, it changes everything: reassigned from projectionist to night watchman due to cuts at the city hall, he leaves his cramped rented flat and takes up secret occupation at his workplace.

Who finds shelter in the dream palace?

Pelu does not stay alone. The Guardian's review lists the outsiders he welcomes through the doors:

• his unemployed roommate
• an ageing drifter
• a sex worker who livestreams her erotic shows from the cinema

Every night, they watch classic films from the old masters — Jean Renoir, Yasujiro Ozu and Robert Bresson, to name a few — until the early hours. The review notes that cinema halls, "or dream palaces, as they're affectionately called," usually offer a retreat into make-believe where everyday drudgery is left at the door.

Sonzini and Salinas invoke something different: a more porous relationship between the screen and its audience. Here, the messiness of life beguilingly sneaks into the domain of fantasies, blurring the borders between public and private spaces.

What holds the film together?

Two forces work in tension. The luminous black-and-white cinematography lends a dreamy fuzziness to the images. The narrative concerns, by contrast, stay grounded in thorny economic realities: reassignment, unemployment, rented rooms too small to live in.

The review's central claim is that the film functions as an argument for cinema as a public good — a building that houses people when the state stops providing for them. The theatre in Córdoba becomes both a shelter and a screening room, and the film refuses to separate the two functions.

Whether The Night Is Fading Away reaches audiences beyond the festival circuit, its portrait of a cinema absorbing the casualties of austerity will resonate wherever single-screen theatres face the same budget math.