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To shoot: a gun or a movie camera. The military analogy is born with the beginning of cinema. Eléonore Weber’s (Les Hommes Sans Gravité, IndieLisboa 2008) documentary is exclusively based upon footage recorded by French and American soldiers in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. From the top of their helicopters, a viewfinder scans the night and watches for suspicious activity from moving heat dots. They have the power to take or keep lives.
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“”There is always the risk of being wrong, but once we open fire, it is difficult to stop””. When flying in the theater of external operations, all that the military helicopter pilots see is filmed and then archived. It is by relying exclusively on these images and on the anonymous testimony of a pilot that the director Eléonore Weber created There will be no more night, an amazing and meticulous documentary telling the war entirely in the eye of the beholder and gradually expanding from very precise technical explanations to broader questions on morality and society. Restoring the decryption of different situations by her anonymous witness pilot, the filmmaker scrolls through a large sample of terrifying episodes where surveillance, frightening precision of the shots, the anguish of errors (which inevitably occur) intermingle. From mountains to cities, bodies fall on the screen, the wounded are finished, passers-by walk… the camera’s eye rivets them… The most recent cameras can suppress the night: “”Soon, some will see as if it was daylight. The rest will remain in darkness.”. (Mickael Gaspar)
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