‘Night Is Not Eternal’ Review: Nanfu Wang Keenly Observes the Fight for Freedom in Cuba at a Crucial Moment

While most nonfiction filmmakers remove themselves from the narrative equation of their work, never explicitly addressing their personal investment nor including their image or voice on screen, Chinese documentarian Nanfu Wang has forged her career doing exactly the opposite. The way her narration factors into each of her features, she has enmeshed her own experiences in relation to the subject to contextualize the macro themes of the piece. Her latest, “Night Is Not Eternal,” continues along the same creative lines for a piercing dual portrait of two women — one of them being Wang — familiar with similar evils.

Wang’s self-referential approach here manifests itself through the presence of footage from several of her films, most notably her 2016 debut “Hooligan Sparrow,” about activists demanding justice in a case of sexual abuse against elementary school girls. The image of civilians standing up to injustice resonates across continents. With each project, she further cements the sense that her body of work is part of a continuum, both documenting sociopolitical issues, as well as how these intimately affected her life.

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It was while screening “Hooligan Sparrow” at a festival that Wang crossed paths with Cuban activist Rosa María Payá. A bond developed between them comparing notes on life under the grip of authoritarianism in their respective societies. Parallels between the director’s memories of growing up in a socialist China, where her films are banned, and Payá’s everyday interaction with harassment and surveillance, propelled Wang to travel to Cuba and record Payá’s efforts to enact change on the ground, dividing her time between Havana and Miami.

For several years, Wang closely followed Payá around the U.S. and other countries as her rising prominence among exiled Cubans turn her into a key political figure. The doc’s title is lifted from a book written by Payá’s father, Oswaldo Payá, a revered activist who believed in the self-determination of the island nation without U.S. intervention, which was published posthumously. The phrase encapsulates the unwavering hope of the Cuban people that their decades-long nightmare under Fidel Castro (and now his successors) will one day end because darkness eventually always yields to light. His unwavering fight for democracy cost him his life at the hands of the regime in 2012, a devastating event that forced his children, Rosa María included, into exile.

Fully settled in her diplomatic persona, Payá steadily loses the approachable quality from the footage shot in Cuba, and an unspoken distance is created between her and Wand. It’s only when the latter shoots Payá dancing after an exhausting day of conferences and meetings that her image returns momentarily to the more unvarnished idealism of before. Wang presents that sequence in blurry slow motion, as if trying to mine all meaning from this rare moment of joyful abandon for Payá — the only time the filmmaker has seen her acquaintance fully disconnected from her all-consuming cause. Visual punctuations like this, inserted in conjunction with editor Michael Shade, add a kinetic quality to the film.

Two-thirds of the way into the keenly observed “Night Is Not Eternal,” a not entirely unexpected turn creates a rift between Wang and Payá, as the doc engages with the right-leaning politics of large swaths of Cubans in exile in the U.S. One shot from a Donald Trump rally reveals Payá in attendance. Perhaps worried about alienating her interlocutor, Wang fails to press Payá on camera about her support of a candidate who embodies American bigotry and who is a beacon of extremism. Through voiceover, Wang shares details from off-the-record conversations which unveil Payá’s ambiguous feelings about the former president. Her willingness to cozy up to such a poisonous figure in hopes that his tactics may help her goal and keep her in the favor of the exiles, which reads like a typical “the end justifies the means” mentality, unsettles Wang. She ponders why people who flee dictatorships gravitate toward Trump, who mimics some of the same ills as their previous oppressors.

Even as Cubans at home risk death by taking to the streets in unprecedented numbers, Payá refuses to condemn the U.S. embargo on Cuba, despite her late father’s vocal argument against it. He claimed that those sanctions had done very little to diminish the Castro regime’s stronghold on the island and only hurt the population. From Payá’s silence and her skirting of some questions emerges a clear picture of her transformation, not only in the way she dresses and behaves, but in her incongruous platform. She demands international support for the Cuban cause while aligning with an administration that thrives on the dehumanization of immigrants and other marginalized populations.

And even though Wang doesn’t grapple with Cuban exceptionalism as it relates to how expats think of themselves as distinct from those from Latin American and elsewhere, her images potently communicate this alarming dissonance. Footage of a rally for Cuba’s liberation in Florida shows the flag of that nation waving side by side with a MAGA one.

Wang doesn’t include an obvious comparison to how the U.S. government used force against its own citizens during the Black Lives Matter protest of 2020 when showing how Cuban demonstrators are treated (she instead shows footage from the Tiananmen Square). Still, it’s evident these are reflections of the same violence. Though it leaves one wanting for more hard-hitting, confrontational exchanges with Payá, “Night Is Not Eternal” evinces the road to change as winding, perilous, and far from immaculate.

“Night Is Not Eternal” is now streaming on Max and HBO.