There is no creation without destruction, no light without darkness. When the great colonial powers (great as in imposing, not as in good) of centuries past ventured beyond their native lands to expand their territories and, thus, their wealth and power, they created through destruction. They created new international borders by destroying the fabric of local communities, new, enforced imperial domination by destroying authentic existing cultures, new, grand buildings and monuments at home by destroying the natural resources of the countries they’d invaded and violently subjugated.
Among the most naked modern-day symbols of colonialism are the international territories under the official control of European states, like Melilla, a Spanish city bordering Morocco on the North African coast. Here, French filmmaker Sylvain George shot his previous two documentaries, Obscure Night – Wild Leaves (The Burning Ones) (2022) and Obscure Night – Goodbye Here, Anywhere (2023), centering upon North African migrants living rough in the city, attempting to cross the Mediterranean and enter mainland Europe. Melilla is a fairly humble city, largely lacking in ostentatious colonial splendour; its heritage in this regard is laid most bare in the presence of the Spanish settler population alongside these migrants, only designated as migrants due to Melilla’s enduring colony status.
In the third film in George’s trilogy, Obscure Night – “Ain’t I a Child?”, the passive eye may regard less blatant evidence of Europe’s nasty colonial history — this installment is set in Paris, thousands of miles from Africa, again following a group of young North African migrants on the streets. But the evidence is only less readily apparent; it’s more overt, more imposing, and far uglier for its ostensible beauty. Rather than wandering the simple beachfront streets of Melilla, George’s subjects here gather around the Eiffel Tower or in the Place de la Concorde, surrounded by these lavish fruits of their ancestors’ suffering, splendour erected out of exploitation. They’ve come to Paris seeking a better life, only achievable in Western Europe due to what it created out of the destruction of their home countries. Many of these young migrants are from Algeria, a nation with a still-recent troubled political history with France.
Ironically, a better life is not what awaits these young men — George only follows men and boys across all three of these films, and the phone calls home to families suggest that they’ve made this journey for their families’ sake. Europe is either unprepared or unwilling to bear the increasing influx of refugees and economic migrants from the Global South in the past few decades, the inevitable result of their imperial meddling many decades before. “Ain’t I a Child?” is of a piece with the previous two films in chronicling the poverty and delinquency of its subjects’ lives on European soil — their homes may have been destroyed by Europeans generations ago, the ramifications still felt today, but new homes are not being created for them in Europe, as the continent undergoes a seemingly unstoppable political shift rightward. Run-ins with the French legal system are common — the boys speak of court appearances and stints in prison — and, despite some having intended to stay in France upon arrival, many now seek to travel to Germany, or the Netherlands, or Sweden. They don’t seek to travel to Spain, though, since their journey from Africa took them past that way already, and they risk imprisonment if they return.
Where Wild Leaves focused on adults, and Goodbye Here, Anywhere on young adults and older teens, “Ain’t I a Child?” is about the lives of children — the teens are hardened enough by the difficulties of their lives as to appear as adults, and the younger boys enough that they behave like their older counterparts: tough, embittered, threatening violence on one another upon mere mild provocation. It’s a sad, regretful existence, made more so by the lack of compassion shown to these boys — authorities move them on or arrest them, locals ignore them, the system evidently intends to forget them. George’s eye, however, intimately involved yet resolutely unobtrusive, never editorializes. As in all fly-on-the-wall documentaries, there’s a fascinating tension between what we’re presented as reality and our appreciation of the subjects’ awareness of their being filmed, thus blurring the line separating true reality from what may be a kind of performance from those subjects. But George is an observer first and last, and the inexorable truth of these boys’ reality is that it is an ignominious one. Some of the film’s most affecting imagery is of several boys sleeping on metal grating with no bedding whatsoever — unconscious, they’re incapable of performing at all, and there’s no escaping the plain, simple hardship on display.
The boys live in trash spaces in the sumptuous surroundings of central Paris, hidden behind walls and beneath streets. These are the spaces of destruction caused by the incessant creation in Europe’s maintenance of its ill-gotten affluence, like the trash can in the corner serving as a permanent reminder of the price of keeping up appearances. In their present difficulties, they rarely discuss today, but rather reminisce about yesterday and hope for a better tomorrow. In three films, Sylvain George has charted a physical journey that suggests that such a better tomorrow may be an unlikely one; in reverse, he’s charted a journey through time — the men of Wild Leaves were in no better a future than the boys of “Ain’t I a Child?”, despite their advanced age, just as these boys are in no better a future than those men, despite their location. With so little to lose, they pass time by engaging in destruction of their own, from the insignificant — flashing a lighter flame across their palms — to the severe — one incarcerated boy is described as having mutilated himself — to simply watching the light of a sparkler fizzle out into darkness. This film is full of vibrancy, yet it’s distinctly sombre, and hauntingly beautiful in George’s oily, high contrast black-and-white cinematography.”Ain’t I a Child?” is a poignant conclusion to one of contemporary cinema’s most exceptional projects.
Published as part of Cannes Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 3.
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