Membering the Night Witches (2020)

The Radar read

A quieter title still finding its audience, though the rating rests on a thin sample, so treat it as provisional.

Synopsis

“On June 12th 1942, the Night Witches received their first baptism by fire. They were injected with the blood of the vampire bat, to see in the dark. They flew in wooden planes. No radar or radios. They had to be magic, they must have been drugged, or witches, or magic, to see in the dark. They were aged 17 to 26, the Night Witches. They dropped 23,000 tonnes of bombs on the fascists. ‘Be proud, you are a woman.’” Weaving a gothic-fantasy of the all-female Soviet WW2 bomber pilots the ‘Night Witches’, Membering the Night Witches presents an auto-baptism and auto-fertilisation calling for urgent antifascist liberation from our toxic selves. The intense improvised live performance is a noisy hymn for impossible queer longing, evoking psychic-political spirits from the undercurrents of transness, ecstasy and Christian mysticism.

Synopsis and metadata sourced from The Movie Database (TMDB).

Radar blends quality, momentum and freshness into one “what to watch now” number — so a great older film can sit lower than a rising new release. The Quality signal above is the time-neutral rating, which is why an acclaimed classic keeps a high quality score even when its Radar number is lower. Radar outputs are editorial algorithmic recommendations, not objective facts, and may change as signals update. A Radar score is not the same as a TMDB, IMDb or critic rating. How scoring works (v3.0).