Autumn 2019 in Beirut. The streets are shaking day and night with the slogans and chants of a people who have decided to turn their frustration into revolutionary exhilaration. Ghassan Salhab is in the crowd, at the heart of the uprising. Day after day, demonstration after demonstration, without planning to make a film, he keeps filming. Because he stands with the crowd, rising up as well. Then comes the lockdown, which ruins the momentum. Then the port of Beirut explodes. Then Israel launches its army against Gaza. Autumn 2019-Winter 2023: Night Is Day is both the chronicle of a collective disaster and the diary of a man who only has cinema to protest, in his solitude. Ghassan Salhab decided to make a film out of the dozens of hours of footage collected on his cell phone, using the power of editing to counter the inability of mankind to defy the crushing march of time. As long as the uprising lasts, the shots seem to repeat themselves endlessly, similar yet different, while the succession of songs shows variations on a shared conscience in the making, a prodigious collective force of creation. What the energy of the street actually lifts is time itself, as if suspended in mid-air. When people start wearing masks and the streets become empty, time resumes its course. Night spreads, personal losses make the mourning of the possibility of a shared world even more tragic. The aching beauty of the film lies in its poetic transformation, from collective epic to the individual elegy of a man who continues to film (despite) the collapse, despite the blindness, the helplessness that seem to affect cinema itself. Filming and phrasing: silent words are written on the screen, in place of people's songs. Words exchanged at night with a Palestinian friend, to share what is left: rage and anger. Cyril Neyrat