Synopsis
In a well-known queer club in Geneva, Joy Falquet, a young trans artist, fascinates the director. She has to be the central character of his film! But unfortunately, she disappears without a trace. The show on the club’s stage is populated by ghosts who may be an endangered species, like Joy, vanishing into the darkness.
A word from Tënk
The flickering of black & white film, end-of-life colour video, and the omniscient eye of a surveillance camera: the images in Oiseaux de Nuit record the filmmaker-narrator’s quest to find the transgender dancer Joy, a figure glimpsed one night on the stage of a queer club in Geneva, who’s since disappeared, through the places she frequented. As always when one films the search for a vanished person, memory blends with fantasy and facts become phantoms. With great sensitivity, the young Swiss director Mateo Ybarra leads us deep into a ghostly night, all the more disturbing now that our pandemic era has made the dance floor seem so far away. This fifteen-minute essay reminds us of the mysteries of a populated night and sketches a portrait of an offbeat Geneva.
Nicholas Elliot
Programmer at Locarno Film Festival
