Writer/director Julia Loktev

Day Night Day Night is a testament to the power of the unspoken. It is precisely what director Julia Loktev chooses not to tell us that fills the unsettling emptiness and dread of her first dramatic feature. A close tracking shot follows a woman's movements as she makes her way through a crowded terminal. Her face is obscured. She is of indiscernible racial and ethnic background. She will remain nameless. She speaks with a non-descript American accent. Why she has agreed to be sequestered away in a featureless hotel room to record a video of herself holding an AK-47 is never explained.

The sequences of bored suspense as she awaits the masked men who will prep her for her mission are moments of infuriating and stupefying disbelief. The muted palette of cold blues explodes into a riot of color and hyper-sensory visuals as she disembarks from Port Authority and wanders into Times Square, her hand clutching and releasing the trigger mechanism of the 50-pound nail-bomb in her backpack. Why did Loktev chose this subject-matter? What did she learned from the Al Qaeda handbook posted on the CIA website? What it was like occupying the thought processes of a young female suicide bomber without divulging her motivations? Loktev explains.

Luisa Williams in Day Night Day Night

Premiere: Where did the concept of the story originate?

Julia Loktev: It came from an article that I read in a Russian newspaper about a girl who was walking down one of Moscow's main streets with a bomb in her bag. At some point, it diverges from the film but it provided a seed that I played off of. But the ending of the film is what attracted me in advance, what to me the film was about. Of course that's the one thing we can't speak about. It's the elephant in the living room that makes interviews sort of odd.