Isaki Lacuesta’s body of work has always braced itself against formidable challenges, and with One Year, One Night he may have crafted his most ambitious and most intimate project to date. The film leans into the memories of a massacre survivor, Ramón González, who processes his past through writing a powerful work titled The metal of peace, love and death. This creative act becomes a conduit for exorcising the traumas that linger from that night and the lingering echoes that followed him for years.
With the project, the filmmaker acknowledges a heavy responsibility. The attack has imprinted itself on collective memory: a beloved concert venue, once a place of music and communal joy, becomes a site of violence and mourning. The director explains that he drew red lines to navigate the line between truth and ethics, insisting that no one was shot, there was no coup, and no terrorists appear on screen. The aim was to illuminate through image rather than sensationalize. He describes how the story unfolds through the characters, letting memory surface from the subconscious, a repressed image shaped by trauma that the characters themselves struggle to assimilate.
prism of subjectivity
The release window for the film frames a two-pronged point of view. Alongside Ramón González, portrayed by Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, the audience meets his partner Céline, played by Noémie Merlant, who also reexamines what happened. Céline’s instinct is to talk, yet she also embodies a protective shield of denial. Two distinct responses to pain emerge, each crafting the event anew so that the memories of that night haunt them for a year. Viewers are invited to piece together the riddle of what was felt and experienced through their respective subjectivities, creating a lived, immersive experience built with a meticulous assembly that rewards attentive watching.
“We aimed to align with their emotional and perceptual states—how sight and sound shape memory,” the director notes. The imagined chaos of their thoughts should feel authentic, yet fragmentation is not employed as a stylistic gimmick. It serves to mirror the inner strains of the protagonists; the director granted himself a certain puppeteer-like touch, not to manipulate the audience, but to translate fear and suffering into a more precise cinematic register.
The production team collaborated with a choreographer to capture the way the characters move, from the startling strides that betray their shock as they emerge from the ruin of the hall to their more restrained reactions to abrupt sounds. Physical contact emerges from an initial stage of tentative touch, reflecting how trauma often announces itself first through sensations and afterwards through action. The director’s past work, including a documentary on ETA, informed his approach, and conversations with survivors from the Basque conflict helped validate the film’s observational choices.
structural racism
One Year, One Night casts a sharp light on racism and social exclusion that persist in modern life. Céline works at a center for minors, encountering hostility from youths who feel marginalized. The film foregrounds a troubling statistic—France’s arab-origin population is pervasive in early eras of immigration, yet stigma and surveillance color daily life. By weaving this into the narrative, the filmmakers confront preconceptions head-on, urging viewers to acknowledge the inner prejudices that can animate even well-meaning people. The goal is not to preach but to reveal the moment a fear or bias reveals itself, so that it can be acknowledged and addressed rather than concealed. The director, who resides in Salt, near Girona, underscores that there is a real and ongoing issue of racial discrimination in the country, one that mirrors broader European conversations about inclusion and belonging.
Ramón González’s life path is described as transformed by his experiences. He pivots toward writing as a way to process and make sense of what happened, seeking to teach in one of Paris’s most diverse neighborhoods. The weight of those memories remains, shaping choices and aspirations, long after the immediate events pass. At the Berlin Film Festival, responses to the film highlighted a range of public readiness and curiosity: some audiences confront what occurred, others choose denial, and some will never know whether remembering or forgetting is the right path. The film thus becomes a conversation about difficult truths, memory, and the social forces that shape who we become after collective trauma.