Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.The best known moth in film is namechecked halfway into Nocturnes, a gently mesmeric documentary about the insects and the people who study them. The Hollywood star is the death’s-head-hawkmoth, featured in The Silence of the Lambs. “It’s very famous,” says ecologist Mansi Mungee. For her, though, that big-screen history doesn’t make it any more exciting than the standard hawkmoth she is researching, or any other species here in the Indian eastern Himalayas, where fog billows through the trees and the smart visitor is wary of elephants.The film looks lovely — by necessity a study in light. Under Mungee’s gaze, endless specimens are drawn to a glowing sheet; a mothtropolis of sweet-shop colours and ornate markings, and yes, the looming hawkmoth. But it is no less transfixing when a black screen makes you focus on the sound alone, like a thousand tiny card decks being shuffled. The moth mind is sometimes simple: beating wings are a means to keep warm. Much else is a scientific puzzle. “There’s something going on we don’t understand,” a colleague of Mungee’s remarks. Plenty, in fact. The film is about moths, but also about man, and time as well as light. The particular study Mungee is involved in will take two years, but to really crack the under-explored mysteries of the hawkmoth? “At least a few decades” is the estimate, and you may pause to process that, with the moth already haunted by climate change, and the human attention span what it is.★★★★☆In UK cinemas from December 6
