| The power of It Would Be Night in Caracas sneaks up on you. A story so important and universal, you very slowly get more and more enraptured until you’re left shaking marvelling at what you have just watched. It’s a story that affects approximately 8 million Venezuelans living in exile that the rest of the world might not realize the depths of the horror because it is not actually considered war, even though that is exactly what it is. | | 2025
Directed by: Mariana Rondón, Marité Ugas
Screenplay by: Mariana Rondón, Marité Ugas, and Karina Sainz Borgo
Starring: Natalia Reyes, Edgar Ramirez
|
Adelaida (Natalia Reyes), who shares a name and a home with her recently deceased mother, returns from the cemetery to find that her apartment is no longer her apartment. A brutal and violent paramilitary group has decided it is their apartment after all the woman who owned it is now deceased. With her street over-taken by the paramilitary group and an equally violent biker gang, she has nowhere to go. Her one attempt at running away found her being saved by an old childhood friend, and taking her back to where she just came from, her neighbour’s apartment, directly across the hall from her old place that has all of her stuff but is no longer hers.
The movie starts with an odd pace fuelled by the very isolating nature of Adelaida’s situation. Out on the street is literal war. Furniture and bodies lit on fire, people being shot and stabbed, and all she can do is watch. Hope that something changes. She’s not entirely alone, Santiago (Edgar Ramirez) who saved her is the brother of her closest friend from childhood, a man who was in prison and is now presumed dead since his sister can’t track him down anywhere. He’s basically doing whatever he can to stay alive, which for now involves hiding out with Adelaida in an apartment that belongs to somebody else. (I’m keeping that part vague on purpose because while it’s not really a spoiler and just a small turn in the movie, going into this with as little knowledge as possible best allows you to soak it in and experience its power).
Friends and family living abroad who are close to those in Caracas seem to have a pretty good sense of what is going on. They call and try to help Adelaida, the next door neighbour, or Santiago; but the outside world, like those of us watching this movie who don’t have any connection to Venezuela, most likely don’t know at all what this war is like.
It’s unusual to have a war movie directed by a pair of female filmmakers, but they bring such a unique eye to this genre. The war is happening, but we are slightly removed from it. Adelaida mostly watches the war from her window, she’s not fighting in it, and for the most part they’re not directly coming after her. But this also isn’t just a war movie, it’s a movie about identity, what makes Adelaida herself? Is it her name, her books, her photographs, her memories? Is it her culture? Her country? Where she’s from? But what if her country isn’t going back to how she remembers it, how can she get a new life while locked inside from the war raging outside.
It Would Be Night in Caracas is an extremely powerful exploration of those questions arising during the very real war that is still happening in Venezuela. It’s a movie that just builds and builds and builds into a very tense and compelling ending. It’s also a movie that had to be filmed in Mexico City because it’s not possible to make it in Venezuela. This is a movie about exile filmed in exile.
|
