The Complexities of Fighting for Democracy

If you’ve watched a lot of political documentaries, especially those that deal with American politics, I think you’ll agree with me on this: Many, if not most, are overly simplistic. It’s just hard to explain the current social and cultural moment, or adequately chronicle the rise of a controversial figure, in a couple of hours. Most often I find they fall along ideological lines with easy answers, rarely challenging partisan orthodoxies or prodding the viewer into new mental territory.

“Night Is Not Eternal” (streaming on Max) is not one of those films. The movie’s director, Nanfu Wang, has spent her career making truly provocative documentaries, often about her homeland of China. Her first feature, “Hooligan Sparrow,” about Chinese human rights activists, resulted in Wang herself being surveilled by the government. In “One Child Nation,” she explored the ramifications of China’s one-child policy. “In the Same Breath,” about governmental response to the start of the Covid-19 pandemic both in Wuhan and in the United States, finds uncomfortable similarities between the two.

Wang’s films often blend personal experience with broader political and social critique, and her newest does the same. Wang emigrated to the United States in 2011, and her political perspective is informed by firsthand experience of both Chinese and American public rhetoric. That lends an outside-the-box point of view to “Night Is Not Eternal,” which on its face is a film about the Cuban activist Rosa María Payá, whom Wang met at a film festival years ago. Payá’s father, the anti-authoritarian activist Oswaldo Payá, died in 2012 in a suspicious car crash, declared by official Cuban state TV to be an accident (an account later refuted by a report from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights). His daughter took up his fight as her own.