Perpetual Radiance is a quietly unsettling meditation on the disappearance of night in an era dominated by artificial light. Through a fictional narration layered over field footage from the Netherlands, the film unfolds as a poetic, four-chapter inquiry into the loss of natural darkness. Still and slow-moving images of flowers, birds, and bleached skies, are rendered in vibrant, sometimes jarring tones of pink, black, and white. Inverted colours and stark contrasts invite both visual discomfort and reflection, mirroring the disorientation of a world where light no longer rests.

The film’s essayistic quality lies in its structure and tone: neither linear nor didactic, it lets image and voice weave meaning gradually. ALAN (Artificial Light at Night) becomes more than an acronym—it is a metaphor for human overreach, for the sterilisation of natural rhythms, for a rupture in the once coexistent relationship between human and non-human life. Nature appears as both subject and projection, studied and shaped by human desire for mastery. As light colonises space once held by shadow, darkness – where life once flourished – vanishes not with violence, but with a hum of quiet inevitability.

Perpetual Radiance is part of the New Perspectives block, which spotlights emerging filmmakers who are expanding the possibilities of the essay film form.