52 Films by Women Vol 7. 19. NIGHTSIREN (Svetlonoc) (Director: Tereza Nvotová)
As pleased as I am to feature a Slovakian film in this series (the first), I confess to being disappointed with Nightsiren ( Svetlonoc ), directed by Tereza Nvotov á from a screenplay she co-wrote with Barbora Namerova, their second collaboration after Nvotov á ’s 2017 film, Filthy . It’s a not-so-everyday tale of a young woman who returns to the village she fled as a child to reclaim her inheritance and is treated as a witch by a community inculcated with misogyny. Things come to a head in the seventh chapter when two young children go missing and male outrage reaches tipping point. Where it fails is in rooting superstition in a believable context. Even allowing for the lack of television in a rural community that slaughters geese, they are exposed to modern hospitals and computers. I wondered why Nvotov á and Namerova didn’t instead focus on a community that chose to believe superstition to deal with reality rather than accept the modern world. They go to church but that’s n...