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Support Hyperallergic’s independent arts journalism for as little as $8 per month. Become a Member In 2016, Nanfu Wang — an acclaimed documentary filmmaker best known today for the candid, personal way in which she exposes the far-reaching costs of state propaganda — had just completed her first feature film. Hooligan Sparrow toured international film festivals, and at one of those festivals, Rosa María Payá was in the audience.
What she saw on screen — a Chinese woman fighting for justice for six elementary school girls who had been sexually abused, incurring the wrath of local police and national officials — resonated with her own struggles back in Cuba. The daughter of the leading dissident of Fidel Castro’s Communist Cuba, Oswaldo Payá, she picked up where he left off after his abrupt death in a mysterious car crash in 2012. Payá sought Wang out after the screening, and each found in the other a comrade and confidante.
Over the next seven years, Wang followed Payá from Cuba to Puerto Rico to the United States, documenting her fight for a democratic Cuba and witnessing her transformation from an unwitting successor of her father to a leader in her own right. The resulting film became Night Is Not Eternal (2024)..