A lovely art-house film that it seems to me is far less talked about than it should be, considering how influential it was, despite being little-seen by the wider public. The film in which Oscar-winner Aleksandr Petrov first found his artistic voice and used the technique that made him famous. The spark for Petrov's fascination with the writer Andrey Platonov, which led to his Oscar-nominated The Cow (1989). One of the first clear examples of Yuriy Norshteyn's growing influence as a pedagogue (there was also Prorokova's 1982 A Priest Had a Dog, but "Night" is far more Norshteyn-esque).

Tracking down the information for it took far longer than I thought it would. Petkevich himself seems to have never talked about it, nor the reasons for the two different release versions (the fact that there are two versions of the film doesn't even seem to have been noticed anywhere until now). Animator.ru has almost no data about the film, and lists the wrong studio. The information about the awards it won is almost certainly at least partly wrong.

I first read the two Platonov stories that it is based on just recently, and I would highly recommend them. They are very moving. I would even say that the film, good as it is, pales in comparison. I have not had time yet to see if there are any good English translations - if I find any, I'll add them to the description.

Petkevich himself (and his wife Yelena) would continue mining the images from "Night" for his subsequent films for more than a decade, until he abruptly became disillusioned with art-house filmmaking and denounced his previous films around the year 2000 or so. If I had the chance to ask him some questions, I would perhaps ask: "Do you still like the works of Platonov? Do you consider Platonov to be art-house? Or is that sort of thing okay in literature, but not in film? What would you do differently today?".

EDIT: To be honest, I'm not even quite sure that this IS paint-on-glass. Sometimes I think I see brush strokes, but I also see some graininess in some parts, so I wonder if it could be powder animation. In his later films, Petkevich seems to have used both of these techniques (or at least his wife Yelena used powder animation in Forest Tales... I'm no longer certain about The Tree of the Motherland).