The night filmmaker Ian Cheney moves into his apartment in New York, he pulls his grandfatherʼs old telescope onto a Brooklyn rooftop to survey the night sky. But bathed in its glow of orange streetlights, the City that Never Sleeps only has five stars to see. What begins as a disappointing autumn evening becomes a journey to answer a simple question: do we need the dark? From Mauna Kea to Death Valley to Paris, THE CITY DARK is the definitive new film about light pollution and the disappearing dark.

The City Dark follows Ian Cheney to the darkest (and brightest) corners of the earth on a quest to understand the ecological, astronomical, and medical consequences of light pollution. In our predominantly urban planet, astronomers say they can no longer see the asteroids that threaten to hit us due to the sky glowing from the lights of cities. Turtles hatchlings migrate toward city skylines instead of the ocean’s moonlit glow, and breast cancer rates. The City Dark is a unprecedented portraits of earth after dusk, and a meditation on our relationship to the stars as we know it.