Into the Night

Set in the lurid, perpetual neon burn of the nighttime city, with its 24-hour stores and restaurants, Into the Night explores sleeplessness and its discontents. Insomnia remains an enigma. More than a third of the world suffers from it, and billions are spent each year on prescription drugs to cure it. Nevertheless, it appears that the real difficulty with this elusive condition is that nobody knows quite what to do about it.

Filmmaker Annette Mangaard, herself a lifelong insomniac, has crafted a searching, lyrical, revelatory film, a sleep-noir journey, tracing one night of her own endless exhaustion--and everybody else's.

Mangaard, desperate for some rest, submits herself to a sleep clinic. She talks with wonderfully lucid, hollow-eyed fellow travellers about their varying worlds of sleep deprivation. She muses on sleeplessness in history, sometimes employing witty passages of animation to assist in her speculations (Benjamin Franklin, Charles Dickens and Winston Churchill were all famous insomniacs), and searches through the past for keys to sleeplessness in the present.

An unforgettable guide to the nether world of shadows and exhaustion, Into the Night is a cinematic sojourn into the realm of the insomniac--the tracking of a vivid mind moving through the artificial day of night, searching for rest.