🎟️ Online tickets here! ☀️ Sundance 2024 ✈️ World Cinema 📜 Documentary (2024)

"Which bird is this?" "I have no idea about birds.... I tried very hard to identify birds. But I couldn't." "Me neither." "Then I joined you all and started working with moths." "That's great"

Nocturnes—well, what can I say to help you decide? This is a film about moths. When you watch Nocturnes, you will experience being deep within forested mountainsides far from human habitation and the bustle of life. For ten days surrounding the new moon, when the sky is black and the moths are most prone to fly towards your moth light, you'll wake at dusk and go and check your moth cloth scored in…

Rarely do you see people talking so passionately about moths, the variety of forms and colors they come in and how a natural habitat play into their sizes. Premiered at the esteemed Sundance Film Festival, this documentary does a decent job at explaining the purpose of the observer's thesis, to study the relationship between a land's elevation, temperature and a moth's form. While the depth given to this study and the arrival at the conclusion doesn't justify the runtime, I still liked how the movie addresses the issue of rapid environmental changes and how it can affect the entire food cycles in a huge ecosystem. You never really get to know much about these observers beyond the basic goal of…

MOST NATURE DOCS filmed in elephant country are about elephants. Not so Nocturnes, an ethereal closeup of moths in the Eastern Himalayas. Set up a brightly lit screen in these dense forests at night and you’d repel elephants but attract moths by the thousands. Ramana Athreya, a sort of Jane Goodall of Lepidoptera, and her assistants spend endless hours waiting for the right conditions to illuminate their white gridded screen. They’re repaid with a fluttering display of multicolored moths settling themselves into place like rare gemstones in a museum display. Such glowing beauties, slowly ruminated over by the camera and set to a hypnotic score of flute, electronics, and whizzing sounds would make a wondrous film unto itself, and rewards…

I’m glad I had a conversation about how it must be hard to fuck up a nature documentary right before this, because Nocturnes was complete dogshit. 

This wasn’t a documentary. It was at best, ASMR with (occasionally) pleasant B-roll in the background. There was no narrative or dialogue which is fine for a doc, but I also didn’t learn anything! This was literally like watching a Yule Log burn on YouTube for a few hours, there was no content. I was extremely disappointed because I know that moths are an incredibly interesting topic, and this film chose a single, mundane research paper to catalogue. 

The only dialogue was sparse, and it was 95% negativity. I didn’t need to watch Indian…

Beautiful, meditative, immersive, and sobering.

I’m a sucker for the butterflies, moths, and a little bit of research so this experience is something I couldn’t take my eyes away from. The quality of work Anupama and Anirban put into this can be felt through every gentle focus of the smallest moth to capturing the pitter pattering of hundreds of moths drumming their wings against the moth screen that sounded like familiar rain hitting my windows. 

The sound is something to be in awe of, listening to this with headphones on feels so unreal… like I have been placed into a personalized soundscape.

The end of this, waiting to see what they make of their research, is something that I was…

I'm kind of torn on this one because although I got that it was about the meditative nature of research, there were a lot of nothing shots that felt like b roll and didn't really convey the gorgeous location. They don't explain which moth is a hawk moth or give extreme close up shots of the moth screen so we can properly look at specific moths (which I feel are some of the most successful shots) until the end. The film has a very important message about our impact on the climate and how it affects the animals around us, but doesn't express it until the last moment of the film. We don't really know why they are researching other…

My second Sundance film at the fest this year. I watched this one right after Daughters, and the two documentaries could hardly be more different. And I loved every minute. The directors of Nocturnes are some of the most thoughtful, innovative filmmakers I've met. I am so grateful to them for crafting an experience that asks me to change my perspective on time, and to be patient to enjoy the world I get to live in. The more I think about this movie, the more I think it is a quiet masterpiece.

I lived in a tropical rainforest for some years, and the soundscape the filmmakers created for this film brought me right back to what it felt like being…