The Endless Night

Director: Will Tremper

1963 / 85min / DCP

A dense fog has grounded all flights out of West Berlin’s Tempelhof airport in Tremper’s episodic naturalist melodrama, which tracks the chance encounters between the handful of passengers stranded overnight in the terminal’s central hall, including an African farmer, a down-on-her-luck starlet, a Polish jazz combo, a shady businessman, and other finely detailed and delineated characters. Funded out of pocket, filmed on location over the course of 45 after-hours shoots, with a script that was developed on the fly, The Endless Night is an unpolished gem of West German independent cinema finished contemporaneously to the issuing of the Oberhausen Manifesto.