Isaki Lacuesta has faced many challenges throughout her career, but perhaps ‘One year, one night’ is also his most ambitious project, and also his most sensitive.first of all because of the material it uses: memories of a massacre survivor BataclanRamón González, who uses writing (‘The metal of peace, love and death’) to exorcise his ghosts, those who emerged from that night of terror and those who accompanied him for a long time because of the trauma he suffered.
The responsibility in this case was greater, admits the filmmaker. For many reasons, this attack has been fixed in the collective memory. A concert hall where people go to listen to music has become a scene of violence and death. How to catch such brutality? “I drew red lines”, says the director during the presentation of the film in Madrid. Among them, it was stated that people were not shot, there was no coup and terrorists did not appear. It was an ethical decision, raising awareness through image. “I didn’t see myself as capable of showing the attack in the first place, but we see it through the characters, and that’s how we play with their memories, with the concept of the repressed image, with what you have subconsciously stored. because they are unable to assimilate.”
prism of subjectivity
The movie, which is released in theaters this Friday, has a two-pronged perspective. In addition to Ramón González (played by Nahuel Pérez Biscayart), the perspective of his partner Céline (Nóemi Merlant) is also offered. While feeling the need to talk about what happened, a protective shell of denial. Two opposite ways of responding to pain. Therefore, each will recreate those moments in a different way, so that memories of that night will haunt their minds for a year. In this way, the audience will be able to construct the riddle of what they have experienced and felt through the prism of their own subjectivity. A complete experience built with a very detailed assembly mechanism. “We tried to respond to their emotional and mental states of sight and sound. The chaos in his thoughts was important, but I didn’t want fragmentation to be an aesthetic resource He said it was due to the whim of the director, like a puppeteer, but to the heroes, their fears, and their suffering to capture them more precisely.”
The director worked with a choreographer to try to capture as accurately as possible the physical way the characters relate, from their startling strides when they emerge from the hell of the concert hall to the way they react to sounds. Before bodily contact, only touch. “There are experiences that change you inside and show themselves outside. The director, who has been making a documentary about ETA for a while, says he was able to confirm this by talking to survivors of the Basque conflict.
structural racism
Say ‘one year, one night’ racism structural in our society. Céline works at a center for minors and will have to face the hatred of many young people who feel excluded and marginalized. “90% of children in France are of Arab origin, whether they are second or third generation, and they are stigmatized, they are exposed to the gaze of the other every day. That’s why we wanted to introduce this in the movie to confront our own prejudices. Talking about the fear of discovering that there is a racist, disgusting person inside of you, someone you thought didn’t exist, and that when a trigger popped up, you planted it there, I felt very powerful. If we deny that it exists, we will never fix it. There is racial discrimination in our country. and we repeat the mistakes we made in France,” says the director of the immigrant population in Salt, near Girona, where he lives.
Ramón González was able to overcome this, and this experience helped him rethink his life, change jobs, start writing, and teach precisely in one of the poorest areas of Paris, where the majority of the population is interracial. But the weight of his experiences will continue to accompany him. “At the Berlin Film Festival, Noémie Merlant was asked if the French public would be ready to see this film. And there is no homogeneous answer. There are people who have to face what happened and there are those who don’t, and finally there are those who will never know what is best, whether to remember or forget.”
Source: Informacion
