The French director’s documentary Obscure Night – Ain’t I a Child? was selected for ACID, a programme of the Cannes Film Festival featuring audacious works. Sylvain George spoke to SWI swissinfo.ch as his film premiered at the Visions du Réel documentary film festival in Nyon in early April. Sylvain George, a documentary filmmaker and philosopher, concludes his Obscure Night trilogy with Ain’t I a Child?, a title borrowed from an iconic speech, Ain’t I a Woman?, by the African-American abolitionist and civil rights activist Sojourner Truth. As the title implies, George’s final film, a Swiss-French-Portuguese co-production, raises questions rather than answers. What is childhood, and who has access to it? Who is protected and who is neglected? George follows migrant children in his documentaries. The first two films – Goodbye Here, Anywhere (2023) and Wild Leaves (The Burning Ones, 2022) – are set in Melilla, a Spanish enclave in Morocco, a border between Africa and Europe. “The ...
