‘Especially at night’
Director: Víctor Iriarte
Cast: Lola Dueñas, Ana Torrent, Manuel Egozkue, María Vázquez
Year: 2023
Premiere: December 1, 2023
★★★★
The film unfolds on a letter-shaped frame and moves ceaselessly between genres: road movie, noir, musical, thriller, family melodrama, and cinema of ghosts. Víctor Iriarte’s debut feature negotiates a charged chapter from recent history—the forced separation of children during the Franco regime—while examining how official narratives resist scrutiny during political transitions. The director uses a carefully woven structure to interrogate truth, memory, and accountability in a landscape where history can be as slippery as cinema itself.
Three central figures anchor the narrative: a woman who learned, twenty years late, that her child was taken at birth; the adult who adopted the infant without realizing the kidnapping or the mother’s existence; and the son who bears the legacy of both families. The evolving ties among these characters drive a shared pursuit of justice, a reckoning that refuses to let the past stay buried. The film treats revenge not as a spectacle but as a reckoning, a way to unearth what has been hidden for too long.
Defeat of fascism
The director divides the film into four chapters, employing voice narration to layer memory and meaning. Scenes function like pieces of a puzzle that invite the audience to assemble them, bit by bit, to reveal a larger truth. While Iriarte nods toward influences from Hitchcock, Almodóvar, Godard, and Oliveira, he maintains a distinctive rhythm and a camera that speaks with intent. Every frame, every gaze, every movement is loaded with purpose, turning visual choices into a language that conveys weighty ideas through suggestion as much as surface detail. The result is a cinematic experience where a complex web of relationships—romantic, familial, and political—converges to symbolize the broader defeat of oppressive forces that sought to erase memories and subdue personal histories.
The film does not merely recount history; it reframes it through intimate scenes that reveal the cost of silence. The performances illuminate the stubborn resilience of those who refuse to accept the official line, presenting a nuanced portrait of courage in the face of state power. The interplay between private longing and public accountability gives the work a provocative edge, inviting viewers to question who gets to tell the truth and who is silenced by the machinery of authority. In this light, the narrative becomes a meditation on justice, memory, and the moral imperative to confront the past with honesty and compassion.
Across its four acts, the film stages a confrontation with memory that is both personal and political. It demonstrates how love and loyalty can become a driving force for social change, even as it acknowledges the scars left by decades of repression. The fusion of character-driven drama with a broader historical inquiry results in a work that is at once intimate and expansive, a testament to the power of cinema to reveal what lies beneath surface appearances and to illuminate the paths toward truth, reconciliation, and healing.