Made just a year apart, Simone Barbès or Virtue and Nightshift offer two distinct but deeply connected visions of women working through the night. Set in a Paris porn cinema and a West London hotel, they place female workers at the centre of worlds usually seen from elsewhere, observing the desires, dramas and absurdities unfolding around them.

Emerging from radical, low-budget independent film scenes in France and Britain, both films are fascinated by the strange texture of nocturnal time: the waiting, wandering, watching and daydreaming that happens between tasks. Funny, atmospheric and richly humane, they reveal the city after dark as a place of both alienation and possibility.