German director-writer Christina Friedrich’s film The Night Is Dark and Colder Than the Day—set to premiere next week at the 2025 International Film Festival Rotterdam—practically defies description. In it, a group of 33 young children express, in cinema verité style, their deepest and most profound fears and anxieties; from there, the film becomes a journey, in a folkloric sense, through the woods and into the very dreamscapes of these children, where their fears are literalized and confronted.
It’s a film that transcends simple genre boundaries and in doing so, creates a resonant bond between the subjects of the film and its director. In it, the young cast themselves help to create the film’s direction, in the process articulating and enacting their generation’s most deeply felt anxieties. The Night Is Dark and Colder Than the Day is, yet, a hopeful and touching film, one brimming with optimism for that generation’s future.
Christina Friedrich is based in Berlin, where she studied at the Ernst Busch Academy for Performative Arts. Her creative investigations explore the topography of her native Germany, and her work has led her across several continents. Her prior films include Hurensöhne: A Requiem (2021), and ZONE (2024). Friedrich recently spoke with Film Obsessive’s J Paul Johnson about the conception and production of The Night Is Dark and Colder Than the Day. The transcript following the film’s trailer below has been edited for space and clarity.
Film Obsessive: Christina, yours is a film that is not easily described by traditional genre associations. How do you describe it in conversation with others?
Christina Friedrichs: I’ll try my best. I describe it like a collective night journey between waking and sleeping. There’s a special inner landscape, and you are one part of your brain and of your senses are wide open and you are in this kind of awakening and concentration. And another part from your body and from your consciousness is drifting in this kind of darkness, in this kind of dreaming, you can touch some unknown place. And this kind of drifting and walking between dreaming, waking, sleeping is the consistence or the atmosphere inside.
It’s like a collective hiking-wandering expedition—an expedition of a group of children. They are really completely alone in this contemporary moment—really alone. This is not a metaphor, and this is not a utopia. They’re really alone. We shot the movie in the center of this epidemic time, and they were so afraid and nobody talked to them. Nobody was able to talk to them about their fears and their anxiety. So the film is a journey.

It’s a film that features literally dozens of children. I understand that those children also played a significant role in the very conception of the film.
Yes, the 33 children are ones I’ve worked with in my former movie, called ZONE. And these are also children from my hometown. And I worked with them on really serious topics, because ZONE is also a movie about childhood in the landscape. And after this movie, the children asked me, or I met the children in a supermarket and in so many places inside the city, and they would ask me: So, could we make our own movie?
And I told them, Okay, but I can’t make movies with ponies and horses and sunshine afternoons and milk and cakes. So we can work together, but I have to work on serious things. And then we met each other in this sport hall, and I brought them this fairy tale from the Brothers Grimm [“The Boy Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was”]. And I started our conversation.
So I’ve known them about three years. And I asked, so what’s your personal fear? And I received 33 incredible answers. And then I then I said, Okay, we can make a movie. And I wrote every child a letter with questions about happiness about sadness, about time, about space, about their own wishes, future abilities, really, like in a really sophisticated philosophic way. And I received 33 letters [in return]. I read all these letters, and it was really, really touching. And all the letters were written from the deepest portion of their heart. And I decided we are able to make a movie and I use these letters like a libretto and started to make a condensed dossier to make an extract from all these letters and to follow their own inner landscape.
This was a deep preparation, to go with this collective and personal and individual thoughts inside their own landscapes and their own wishes to become a wolf, a werewolf, a white tiger, everything.
Was it always your intent that you would take that step of going out into the field and shooting or reenacting the children’s dreams and nightmares as you did?
It was a process—a kind of inside dialogue. You know, I took all the letters into my consciousness, in my brain and it needs a time to find for me to find the space to follow the paths from the children. And for sure, I deeply related in my movie to all the landscapes and to nature, to forests, to fields, to all these places where the memories are captured. And, yes, from it was a process to rebuild this kind of scenery or to go to find a dark hole inside the Earth around the landscape.
And it was also an expedition to investigate my own landscape through the eyes from the children. And there was also another task: the children landed in their own city in Nordhausen. And there was a task for them to look for a personal place where they are related, a place inside the city. So the result is this really personal land: forests, rivers, stones, and so.

The end result is so fascinating. When you begin watching, you don’t know quite what to expect. And you’re invited as a viewer alongside the children on this journey as they first express and articulate their dreams and nightmares, then as they confront them in a very interesting way.
Oh, God. I had some screenings with really different people. My first screening was a screening with a family with three generations: a younger girl, age 12, and her mother and the grandmother. And the child watched the movie and said, “This donkey is really sad. This donkey is really, really melancholic, and this donkey—it’s me”. And the mother said to me, “All these children are so melancholic and maybe so depressive and this is their way to see our reality.” And the grandmother says, “Okay, there is hope inside.”
And it was really funny because then I saw the movie with my with colleagues. And the men who built all these incredible sculptures—you know, the kinetic objects [in the film]—they are able, like Leonardo Da Vinci manufactured, in effect, do something to fly on the bottom [of a body of water]—and he was in tears. And he told me, “This is a film about love or about humanity. And I guess the children are able to touch our deepest values about thinking what we are doing here on this Earth and how we started our own biography with which perspective and deep insight we started to live in our own life. And we can feel or we can touch our own childhood. And you can use this movie like a key to open your own inner child’s room or your child’s space.” Do you understand this?
I do, absolutely, and I’m smiling as I hear you describe that. I did not have the impression that the film’s content was explicitly melancholic as opposed to some other emotion. I feel a range of emotions, including elation, when I watch. The children are such an impressive cast.
You know, when I started to work with them, there were ten. And I made a call. I’m looking for children who wish to play in a movie. And so I was I was thinking maybe there will come five, six, seven children and 33 children running in this sports hall, and I started to work with everybody. And the 33 children are not in one class. They are mixed, from four classes.
And I know these are children. But I worked with them, you know, like I worked when I grew up in the theater. I’m rooted in the theater and in opera, and I worked a lot with symphony orchestras. And to work with the children—I can work really only as a director with 33 children—it’s similar to working with a symphony orchestra. They are really concentrated. They know the content, they know the topics. After the shooting, they can run and play and shout. But inside the scenes and inside the situations, they are so incredibly concentrated.
I discovered this old castle, and this castle is usually a youth hotel, but there are really, really well kept spaces from the Renaissance time. The feeling is you are in another universe. And every child has this precious moment to sit on this wrapped velvet sofa surrounded by adults. And we were standing, sitting on our knees barefoot for 12, 13 hours, and it was completely silent. Nobody was able to breathe. It was sticky. It was hot. To sit together there and to be a witness to their deep inside souls!

And for sure, the children, all of them were protected: we communicated in a long, long process with letters. And I wrote them their own letters back. And like a poem, and I melded their own words so that they are able to know their own poems. In the moment, the child is surrounded by [our crew]: young Emma [Lena Weber], she’s the director of photography, at 23, just ten years older than the children, and the sound master and the the light man, and everyone was completely concentrated. It was like in a surgery when a heart is laying on a blanket, and you can hear the pulse from the heart.
It was a little bit hypnotic, concentrated, focused, and everyone was also in peace and in freedom. And everyone was also lucky to be there to open this inner space.
It sounds like such an organic and collaborative process. I am curious if there are films or filmmakers or approaches, movements, if you will, that are influencing you as you’re moving forward with your project.
I’ve got no iconic influences. There is nobody. There is just nature. And there is just my understanding of all these invisible things behind the walls, behind the skin, behind the scenes. And every movie is just a way to discover our invisible unconsciousness or landscape. It’s always searching for this. But there is no hero in my life.
For sure, I spent a lot of time in libraries. I spent a lot of time in museums, and my next movie will be a movie about a painter from the 15th century. And yes, I related to different things, but there is no special influence.
Yours is a film that challenges conventional approaches and categories, but it does so in beautiful and evocative ways. It’s premiering at Rotterdam next week, correct?
Yes, on February third, and a delegation of 14 of the children from the film will be there on this world premiere. And this is really, really a beautiful for the children to experience their own world premiere, and they’re really, really excited.
That is wonderful, and that is exciting. And you are working on—do we call it a sequel?
The story will continue. A small group of children are working on the following movie, and it’s called The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars.
That will be something for us to look forward to, as well! Christina, I wish you the very best of experiences at Rotterdam next week. And thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us.
Thank you so much.