05/07/2024 - We sat down with the Peruvian director to discuss his debut feature offering an intimate look at one of the most challenging military trainings in Latin America

(© Film Servis Festival Karlovy Vary)

A group of young men undertake training to join the forces in Peru’s VRAEM region against armed groups and drug cartels and first-time director Paolo Tizón joins them in the barracks. Over the course of ten months, Tizón (armed with a camera) followed their drills and private conversations, resulting in the film Night Has Come [+see also:
film review
interview: Paolo Tizón
film profile], a sensual documentary entry in Karlovy Vary’s 2024 programme, world-premiering in the Proxima Competition.

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Cineuropa: Night Has Come starts without giving us any context. Why did you decide to do that?
Paolo Tizón: It was a difficult choice. At first, we had a draft of the edit which included more context, but in the end, we wanted the film to be an observation of intimacy in the military training barracks. There is some context given here and there, but it’s not the main thing. We decided to put that in the background of the film, so it can also be an invitation for people to research more and to form their own opinions. These institutions play various roles in different countries, but the film is not so much about the institution in relation to society, but the inner workings of it, its inner world.

So is that also the kind of filmmaking you're interested in: observational, intimate, telling stories that could be universal?
Yeah. I think that every film has its own language and its own necessities. So this film had to be made like it was. You have to work for the film, not the other way around.

What were the shooting conditions like in the training barracks?
Really precarious. Premiering the film here, at such a big festival, it's amazing to me because the film was made in a very precarious way. As precarious as the people who are being filmed. We started shooting with no money at all, just me with a $500 camera. Then we added a sound person; I think we were four when the situation was a little bit more complicated to shoot, but the core crew was two or three people. We basically moved in with the soldiers after we got the permit to shoot. We were living together, so sometimes they would forget about the camera. But we had to work towards that point.

In what way? 
At the beginning, they were giving me a kind of commercial, registered acting, but I would keep shooting after they would say some performative lines. We also had a mini workshop with them, I showed them some non-Hollywood films, and Metal and Melancholy, which is a Peruvian documentary from the '90s, filmed with ordinary people, cab drivers and such, and the guys understood that a film could be about them. That they can just be themselves and that ordinary life can be captivating, too. 

There's a point in the film where you’re addressed by name, otherwise your presence is rather invisible. Why did you decide to include that moment?
My presence is all over the film, in a sense, because I shot it myself. There is no voiceover, but my point of view is expressed through the camera in some form, but also with that, I wanted to make it more obvious that there's a person filming. That there's a relation there, instead of that “fly on the wall” kind of illusion. We both are on the same level, the crew and them were meeting on this plane. 

The ending is quite different in form and content. How did you arrive at that? 
It was actually quite hard to figure out how the film would end. We were in post production, done with the editing, and already doing sound, but I didn’t know how to close the film. Then it dawned on me: it's all made in the barracks and we don't see the outside world! So, maybe, we should. To me, that ending represents how the dynamics inside can translate to the outside world, but with a playful element. I wanted to show that life goes on, even after the hard training and the dehumanisation. Life goes on, like in an Abbas Kiarostami film.