la noche de 12 anos (w&d álvaro brechner)

Brechner’s film tells the tale of three political prisoners in the Uruguayan dictatorship. (One of whom subsequently went on to become a celebrated president.) What gives the film its strength is that, save for a few flashback scenes, you’d barely know it. This isn’t so much a film about the dictatorship as a film about the capacity of the human mind to survive, in spite of everything. Astutely, the director, who also wrote the screenplay, sidesteps the impulse to explain or clarify why the three men whose story the film tells, are in prison. Instead it focuses, particularly in the first half, on the sensory experience, something that cinema, more than any other art form, is capable of conveying. The audience enters the labyrinth with the three prisoners and, as far as is possible when compressing twelve years into two hours, experiences their captivity with them.

The title hints at Steve McQueen’s Oscar winner, but far more than that, La Noche de 12 Anos is reminiscent of Hunger, McQueen’s first film. In addition to its cinematic artistry, and in contrast with other dramas about Latin American dictatorships, Brechner does his utmost to eschew sentimentality. Each character is allotted a certain leeway to explore their past and their personal lives, but this is never permitted to distract from the essence of the physical ordeal the men experience. Furthermore, it’s a necessary part of detailing prison life, which is not only that which the prisoner has to endure, but also that which he is deprived of. The love of family, companionship, seeing your children grow up. The acting, in particular the remarkable Alfonso Tort as Huidobro, exercises a similar restraint. These are three nuanced portraits of resilient humanity, in spite of the fact that these are characters who are barely allowed to speak and who have minimal interaction with anyone else. 

The result of the director’s restraint is a film of slow-building power. To watch this film in a full house in Montevideo is, inevitably, an emotional experience, one that illustrates the capacity that art offers to re-live and also to re-think the past of a given society. One would refrain from using the word ‘cathartic’: for some watching this film will be a bitter reminder of time and friends lost. As the audience drifted out I spoke to one veteran actor, a man a long way from the mainstream, who stood and watched the credits roll to the end, clearly deeply moved. However, this is a film which sets out to articulate the anguish of political prisoners on more than just a localised level, meaning that it triggers thoughts about those still held in Guantanamo, or living in limbo in refugee camps. For the film’s three subjects, there was, after twelve years, what might almost be called a happy ending, but again it is to the film’s credit that it does little more than hint at this. The film succeeds because it articulates the universal in the local; because in describing the three men’s ordeal with such vivid, cinematic precision, it compels an audience to confront inhuman political realities which continue to exist and which should never be allowed to occur in any decent civil society, (a concept that is increasingly under threat as ghosts of dictatorships past return to haunt us).