‘Night Vision’ Courtesy of PÖFF Writer-director Christopher Yates knows the meaning of the phrase “indie filmmaking.” His fiction feature debut Night Vision (Öised nägemused) is a self-produced, low-budget film that bends genres and minds and immerses us in a story full of surprises, mystery and dream logic.
Co-written by Sandra Fassio, who also produced Night Vision with Yates, the film, which also features animated segments, gets its world premiere at the 30th edition of the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF) in Estonia. It debuts in its Rebels with a Cause Competition on Nov. 14.
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Night Vision follows Jenny, a young filmmaker in need of inspiration who can’t remember her dreams. Visiting a flea market with her crush Pierre, she buys an old video camera – only to find strange artifacts and “presences” on a tape in it. Can the camera maybe capture dreams?
“As Jenny is searching for a story to tell, the film unfolds as a shaky, moving parable that follows dream logic through free associations, tonal shifts, and genre-bending,” teases the PÖFF website, promising a blend of “autofiction, found footage, romance, and horror,” a “poignant diary film,” a “dreamcatcher that helps us relive the past” and “a rebellious act of filmmaking.”
The cast of Night Vision features Salomé Crickx, Pierre Gervais and Angelo Bison. The cinematographer was Leonor Malamatenios, with Matthieu Jamet-Louis handling editing.
Watch the trailer for Night Vision here.
Yates directed the 2009 documentary Not Here, a road movie about the rock band Girls in Hawaii, and co-directed Reveka (2015), a doc about the mines of Potosí in Bolivia. He is also the co-creator and co- writer of the Belgian series Public Enemy.
Now, he is ready to unveil his first fiction feature at Tallinn. Ahead of the world premiere, Yates talked to THR about his inspirations for Night Vision, shooting parts of it in his Brussels apartment, “the multitude of the departed” as a theme and those The Blair Witch Project vibes.
A lot of different ideas and influences have flown into Night Vision, with its exploration of dreams coming from the creator’s interest in our sleep experiences. “I’m a big dreamer and have been reading a lot, some a bit geeky stuff, about dreams,” Yates tells THR. “In addition to a lot of Freud, I have [amassed] a library of books over the years, even before I had a project about dreams.”
The core set-up for Night Vision suddenly popped into his minds, and it leant itself to an approach that fit his background in docs. “The idea of a camera filming dreams was literally something that came like this,” he recalls. “And I thought it could be good for a film with no money because it was about documentary-style filming.” Along with dreams, mourning and trauma also play a central role in Night Vision. “I lost my father when I was 20, not from suicide [which the film explores], but it was an experience of grief,” Yates explains. “And when you lose somebody, you often meet them in dreams, but in a casual way. You’re like, ‘But you’re supposed to be dead!’ You still have conversations with these people. And this is an inner experience that marks me.”
‘Night Vision’ Courtesy of PÖFF He also had a friend who died by suicide when he was 30, which he remembers as a traumatic experience. “Those experiences of dreams and grief combined with memory, and memory is like a kaleidoscope of things that I put together,” Yates tells THR. “There’s something about the multitude of people that disappear and do not have any trace of memory in the world. With everything going on nowadays in this world. with the wars, there’s something about the multitude of the departed that strikes me as something I’m working on in several ways. It’s not a theme in itself. It’s just a feeling.”
Fittingly, Graveyard of Memories is a potential film idea that Jenny mentions to Pierre after she buys the video camera. That scenes establishes an unusual dynamic between the two lead characters early on. “I had the idea of her being mean and reversing the classic roles between men and women,” Yates explains. “He’s a Labrador, as the actor says about his [character].”
The filmmaker, who has also worked as an editor, kept the creative process open, sharing that, “I love the process of creating while filming, letting yourself be surprised by reality,” as he has done in his documentary work. “I also wanted to give freedom to the actors, space so they could improvise, try stuff. The film was my lab for working with the actors, trying things, having fun. The two leads, Salomé and Pierre, were involved in the writing process. We improvised scenes I had written, and I’d rewrite things after their improvisation, and then they would re-improvise. The shooting happened in this huge friendship-like party zone. It was so much fun. There was just passion from the whole team.”
‘Night Vision’ Courtesy of PÖFF Yates shot part of Night Vision in his apartment in Brussels, where he and the creative team also worked on other parts of the movie. “For her voiceovers, Salomé repeatedly came back to my apartment because we needed some more,” the filmmaker recalls. “Actually, a lot of it was written during post-production.”
And working at home with his co-creators of Night Vision taught Yates a key lesson. “I love cooking,” he shares. “And I learned that cooking for your team, making pasta or mushroom sandwiches, really helps with having a happy team.”
Given the low-budget, self-made nature of the creative process, how did the Night Vision team create the film’s animation and special effects segments? “I watched a lot of YouTube tutorials to turn real footage shot on my iPhone into animation,” Yates tells THR. “I made some mistakes, but I did the animation and the special effects [, including for nightmare scenes,] myself. When the film had its first rough cut with bad animation and bad special effects, we went to ask for funding here in the French part of Belgium, and we got what’s called aide à la finition [post-production and finishing grants] to help finish the film. So, I managed to find professionals and pay them properly so they could do the animation and the special effects professionally.”
Christopher Yates Courtesy of PÖFF Not that the funding brought in a huge amount of money, with Yates describing it as “a little cash to properly pay” those animation and VFX experts. But in true DIY indie fashion, Yates highlights that everyone else worked on Night Vision out of passion for film. “Nobody was paid in this film,” he tells THR. “The whole crew worked on a participation basis, so it’s basically a percentage of whatever we might gross in the end, which will probably be zero, but who knows.”
As you can see in the Night Vision trailer above, parts of the film give off The Blair Witch Project vibes. “Obviously, that’s because it’s a found footage film, even if it’s in a documentary style,” Yates offers. “But I actually haven’t rewatched Blair Witch. I must have been about 20 or even younger when it came out. We were all blown away by it. It was a radical proposition. I have heard it still holds up today.”
What you may or may not notice immediately is how dream logic plays into the way Night Vision unfolds. “The basic narrative idea and structure of the film is the association of thoughts that you have in dreams,” Yates explains. “That’s why it jumps from one idea to the other seemingly randomly, and that’s why I created the idea of a film director who doesn’t know what she wants. So she jumps from one project to another and goes to memory.”
And you can find in Night Vision a meta cinephile discussion about film and its genres. “I am also making fun of the genres that you see a lot in Belgium, such as coming-of-age films,” says Yates. “I was trying to have fun with my knowledge of cinema and using all that to make it into a big sack of fun.”
‘Night Vision’ Courtesy of PÖFF What’s next for the creative? “Sandra, my girlfriend, my companion who is also the co-producer and co-writer of this film, and I are working on several projects,” Yates says. “I have a second feature in the writing [stage]. This new idea is about a nurse who gets hired into a rich house with a seven-year-old child in a coma from a swimming accident. But the nurse has a special telepathic skill and can hear what people feel inside. So, the film is an experiment in sounds. It’s still a bit in the horror genre, but once again with a twist.”
After all, Yates likes to push the envelope. “I love experiments,” he tells THR. “I love to think that if I throw three years of my life into creating a film, the audience should experience something that’s new, or at least something they haven’t seen before.”
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