De noche los gatos son pardos

AT NIGHT ALL CATS ARE BLACK begins as an erotically charged arthouse film set in the French countryside before gradually slipping into stranger territory. When the performers lose their way in the forest and begin to transform into zombies, filmmaking, desire and bodily transformation become increasingly intertwined. Valentin Merz turns the film set itself into an unstable space where performance, fear and attraction constantly shift. The story takes another unexpected turn when the director disappears and is later found embalmed, prompting an inspector to investigate. Yet the inquiry never follows the logic of a conventional crime story. Instead, each encounter blurs the boundaries between fiction and reality, while the cameraman travels to Mexico to fulfil the director's final wish, expanding the film far beyond its original setting. Blending horror, black comedy and queer cinema, the film explores performance, sexuality and the creation of images through a playful, self-reflexive lens. Its constantly shifting tone resists fixed genre conventions, moving freely between the grotesque, the absurd and the intimate. The result is a bold meta-cinematic work that reflects on desire, death and the transformative power of cinema. Written and directed by Valentin Merz, AT NIGHT ALL CATS ARE BLACK premiered in the International Competition at the Locarno Film Festival 2022, where it received a Special Mention for the Swatch First Feature Award. It was subsequently screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and the Woche der Kritik in Berlin in 2023. The film invites audiences into a constantly shifting cinematic world where reality and fantasy continuously merge.