Il n’y aura plus de nuit movie poster and logo

Il n’y aura plus de nuit is a 75-minute documentary film directed by Eléonore Weber. It exclusively uses archival footage of U.S. military drones monitoring and attacking people against whom the United States is at war.

Images from helicopters in the theater of operations. The insatiable eye of the pilots scans the landscape. The men who are being targeted do not know that they are being targeted, they have not spotted where the threat is coming from. The intervention takes place before our eyes. The one who films is also the one who kills.

In this film we hear the conversation between a soldier directing the drone and one who decides whether to act or not. There is also a dialogue between the director and an army member who has to pilot a drone in order to realize this kind of imagery. It is accompanied by a text read by Nathalie Richard.

The film is aesthetically rich because of its use of drone images made with a thermal vision camera. The poster shows one of the images recorded by the drones, depicting inhabitants in their daily life. One of the most shocking moments is when the killer drone pilots start to look at life as if nothing was happening, forgetting who is threatening them. We realize that people are used to this kind of threatening surveillance, and we also realize the disconnection of the pilots from their mission.

A disturbed vision of reality that they feel through their thermal vision glasses and all the sights and movement indicators that are permanently active. A vision that is supposed to be the closest to reality to see everything, but that makes the images completely unreal.

A game of perception that we can feel in the logo of the film. The sans-serif caps are familiar and very readable, but bits of the letters were chopped off. A feeling evocative of the vision of the drone pilots who seem to be disconnected from reality. The font in use appears to be Acumin with some modifications (to the apostrophe and the N).

The title Il n’y aura plus de nuit (“There will be no more night”) refers to the advance of surveillance technology. An advance such that we can monitor both day and night.