Robina Rose - Nightshift

In collaboration with Courtisane, we present the recently restored masterpiece Nightshift (1981) by Robina Rose (1951−2025). Screenings around the world are currently fueling a surge of renewed interest in the work of the British filmmaker who passed away earlier this year.

Essentially unseeable since its release, Nightshift nevertheless garnered significant acclaim at the time of its festival premieres in Edinburgh, Berlin and Film Fest Gent, which hailed it in ​’82 as ​“a more poetic than dramatic film, a kind of autobiographical dream, a mosaic, based on personal experience and echoing a bygone avant-garde, Jean Cocteau or Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad.”

Nightshift was filmed over five nights at the Portobello Hotel in Notting Hill, where Robina Rose worked at the time. It takes place during a single night shift: the lobby work of a hotel receptionist provides the framework for a cinematic exploration of routine, women’s unseen labor and the fantasies of the hotel guests. The reception clerk is played by punk icon Jordan (Pamela Rooke) – agitator of late 70s British counterculture, muse to Vivienne Westwood, and star of Jubilee (1978) by Derek Jarman, who later dubbed her ​“the original Sex Pistol.” Sheis both a spectator and an active participant in the scenes unfolding before her desk, which feature punk band The Urban Guerillas, poet/​actor Heathcote Williams and filmmaker Anne Rees-Mogg. Glowing in honey tones and crimson reds, the hypnotic 16mm cinematography by US maverick Jon Jost (All the Vermeers in New York) harmonizes beautifully with the sensuous, otherworldly score by Simon Jeffes of the legendary avant-pop Penguin Cafe Orchestra.

TRAILER

• “An incredible rediscovery of 1980s British independent cinema that evokes the durational cinema of Chantal Akerman (Hôtel des Acacias, 1982) and surreal feminism of Nina Menkes (Queen of Diamonds, 1991).”

• “Nightshift is a slow-burn revelation that fully belongs in the company of Chantal Akerman and Marguerite Duras.” (Sarah Cooper)

“It is quite likely you may not have heard of [UK filmmakers] Robina Rose, Peter Watkins, Bill Douglas, Terence Davies, Chris Petit, Ron Peck – and forgive me if I include myself. The cinema I love hardly exists in this country, and where it exists it is fragmented and discontinuous; it’s largely ignored by the mainstream and because of this it’s a cinema that is often private, that uses the direct experience of the filmmaker, and is more likely to be in 16mm or Super 8 than 35mm. With luck it will have ​‘real’ people, not Equity members who will be characters. The director will have made it without the normal funding mechanism, and he or she will certainly never have worked for a TV company.” (Derek Jarman, diary 10 November 1983)

“Whereas the broad range of films that fall under the rubric of ​“slow cinema” continues to be framed through the work of male auteurs, it is in the history of women’s filmmaking (Chantal Akerman and Marguerite Duras, among others) that some of the most daring uses of slowness can be found. Nightshift’s drifts can be added to this alternate history of experimentation with cinematic time, anchored as they are to women’s occluded labors, before and behind the camera.” (Elena Gorfinkel)

Preceded by Housekeeper (2025), the new short film by Aaron Denolf (KASK) which was entirely shot in the Holiday Inn in Ghent. The filmmaker also worked in a hotel as part of the research for the film. Housekeeper is a sensory portrait of a family, displaced into the anonymity of a hotel room, where routine becomes a fragile act of resistance. The film was selected for Film Fest Ghent and the upcoming Leuven International Short Film Festival.