‘The Night Is Fading Away’ Review: Cinema as a Shelter of Resistance

“It is for us the living to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced (…) that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
— The Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln

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In the runoff of the 2023 presidential election in the province of Córdoba, current president Javier Milei won with roughly 75 percent of the vote. In last October’s midterm provincial elections, the ruling party also came out on top with 42 percent in a crowded field of candidates. Yet there, as throughout the country, many sectors are facing an enormous crisis and a kind of discontent that borders on anguish. Cordoban cinema, in fact, has long been one of the most perceptive mirrors of Argentina’s political turbulence—a tradition sustained for decades, even as two-thirds or more of its citizens vote for right-wing candidates.

This quote and this preface are anything but arbitrary. The Night Is Fading Away may well be the first and most direct cinematic critique of Argentina’s new government: a film that, with warmth, humor, and a pulse of cinephilia running through its veins, takes a clear stance against policies of cultural austerity, precarious labor, and corporate dehumanization. Small in scale and production, it is a film whose reverberations are vast. Without preaching, it becomes a quiet celebration of resistance—with the history of cinema as its moral compass.

Filmmaker Mariano Llinás often says that watching a lot of classic cinema (“two films a day, preferably made before 1970”) can make you a better person—or at least provide a kind of ethical guide for behaving decently in an increasingly brutal world. Not everyone emerges from cinephilia with moral clarity (Argentina has a surprising number of right-wing film thinkers—perhaps the only country where that happens), but chances are good that someone raised on the films of Chaplin, Ford, Renoir or Ozu will see the world through a more humane, empathetic, and compassionate lens. And that’s exactly what the debut feature by Ezequiel Salinas and Ramiro Sonzini is about: a film set in a movie theater and about the movies themselves, where what happens on the screen often echoes in the lives of those watching.

The story unfolds at the Cineclub Municipal Hugo del Carril in downtown Córdoba, where screenings—and therefore staff—are being cut back. The case in question concerns the projectionists. The theater’s administrator, unwilling to take responsibility (“You decide,” he says cynically), leaves the two employees to settle their fate with a game of rock-paper-scissors—since they can’t even afford a coin toss. The loser will also keep working, but only as a night watchman. With no better options, they agree. The one who loses (or does he win?) is Pelu (Octavio Bertone, a real-life projectionist), a bald, introverted young man who begins aimlessly wandering through the theater’s vast, empty spaces.

Then reality intrudes. When Pelu’s roommate also loses his job, he can no longer afford rent and ends up moving into the theater, stashing a mattress and a few belongings behind the screen. The cinema becomes a strange, shadowy, fascinating home—a place where he drinks beer, eats sandwiches from the bar, and watches old films alone. Gradually, he begins to notice the city’s homeless drifting nearby. Out of empathy, Pelu starts letting them in, offering a safe place to sleep and a flickering light to gather around. Together, they watch films late into the night, discovering in them both solace and a spark of defiance.

Cinema itself—both the physical space and the images projected on the screen—becomes a literal site of resistance, a refuge for society’s outcasts. In one memorable scene, the group watches a movie where they read Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, a foundational speech that still resonates today. The parallels are obvious: the films they watch awaken the belief that resistance—even modest or poetic—is not only possible but necessary.

Along the way, Pelu faces certain temptations and potential conflicts. A young woman he likes sneaks into the theater at night to shoot erotic videos lit only by the projector beam and invites him to join her. Though she earns ten times his salary, he refuses. Perhaps out of principle, he chooses to remain faithful to the moral code of classic cinema—or at least to its spirit. That, ultimately, is what this film conveys: a blend of comedy and drama, underscored by a subtle but unmistakable political pulse.

Reminiscent of the Uruguayan film A Useful Life (La vida útil)—also the name of a film magazine co-directed by Sonzini— and a kinship with early Jim Jarmusch, Italian neorealism, and even Luis Buñuel’s Los olvidados, this Cordoban feature follows its protagonist’s odd adventures as he tries to open the doors of that modern church we call the cinema. Gradually, its deadpan humor gives way to emotional weight, as the once-alienated Pelu realizes that solidarity is the only way to fight back. The movies become his rallying cry.

Shot in soft, cloudy black-and-white with a pace as languid as it is deliberate, La noche está marchándose ya invites us to see cinema as a reflection of the world: a place where comedies, love stories, and social dramas coexist, but whose ultimate purpose is to bring people together—to remind them that unity is the only way to resist. Premiered as the closing film of Fuera de Campo—a Mar del Plata gathering created in protest of the government’s dismantling of the official festival—it mirrored on screen what was happening in the audience. Rarely does cinema generate such a magical alignment: becoming, quite literally, a light of hope in the midst of so much darkness.