Autobiographical films offer their makers the chance to recognize, as adults, the personal and political forces that eluded them as children. In The Night Mohamad Malas returns to Syria of the late 1930s and 1940s to reclaim not only his own childhood as the son of a deeply troubled father, but also his country's struggles with colonial rule and with Zionist settlements in neighboring Palestine. Malas's alter ego is a young boy who lives with his parents in Quneitra, a village in the Golan Heights not far from the Palestinian border. The Syria of his childhood is a territory administered first by the French and then by the British, whose civilian government is quickly overthrown by a corrupt military junta. Dense with historical references and haunting images of daily life in the Islamic world of past decades, The Night is one man's effort to understand both father and fatherland.-SFIFF '94