Night Moves", Kelly Reichardt’s latest film, will receive its first national screening at the 22nd Curtas Vila do Conde Festival, after making its debut in the main competition section of the Venice Film Festival and the Toronto Film Festival. At its American premiere in May 2014, the film received an enthusiastic reception from critics and has been acclaimed as the creative high point of the director’s career. The plot of “Night Moves” centres on a group of three environmentalists who plot to destroy a dam using a boat filled with fertilizer-based explosives. “Night Moves”, the boat they use, lends its name to the title of the film and is also a reference to their night-time manoeuvres in carrying out the plan, featured in a lengthy sequence which the thriller genre is put to the test. The film is another collaboration with Jon Raymond as screenwriter, and again features the Oregon landscape and its farms, now the centre of a plitical and environmental struggle (dams vs. organic farming). The main roles are played by three rising actors on the American film scene: Jesse Eisenberg, Dakota Fanning and Peter Sarsgaard. Within the director’s minimalist style, they portray characters who are fighting their own ghosts. Josh (Jesse Eisenberg), in particular, becomes the key figure in the second half of the film when the three young people begin to fall apart after their plan proves to be less positive than they had thought. From this point onwards, “Night Moves” develops into a study of one character - Josh – and his transformation from radical environmentalist to obsessive, suspicious man. The minimalist register subverts the thriller element, although “Night Moves” plays with both. Even so, silences and oblique dialogue predominate, revealing the inner struggles of the characters, which are fully embodied in Jesse Eisenberg. This film therefore represents the maturation of what may be discerned in previous films: the dialogue between the politics of the community and individual, solitary lives. The key symbolism of environmental emergency is undermined by the radicalism of the act itself and its consequences, fuelling ambiguous reflections on politics and action. “Night Moves” will certainly be one of the big films of 2014 in Portugal.