| For Colombians or for anybody with a personal connection to the November 6, 1985 Palace of Justice siege, Noviembre is likely a very powerful movie. However for the rest of us, this is just a chaotic capture of one moment in history with a lot of screaming and crying for an hour and a half. I would love to paint you a clearer picture, but there really isn’t one – both on purpose and to the detriment of the film. | | 2025
Directed by: Tomás Corredor
Screenplay by: Tomás Corredor, Jorge Goldenberg, Xenia Rivery
Starring: Santiago Alarcón, Natalia Reyes
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It starts in the middle of the action. Whole bunch of people trapped in a Supreme Court building bathroom. Lots of people severely injured, crying in pain, others around them screaming for help, but the only “help” is being offered by the people who put them there – the ones wearing bandanas and pointing machine guns at them. A lot more screaming and crying is going to happen before any story gets formed.
A one sentence description of the historical event is enough to put this movie into context, but that is also all you’re going to get. The M-19 guerilla group stormed Colombia’s Supreme Court armed to the teeth with explosives and machine guns as an act of protest against the President, meanwhile the military, also armed to the teeth with machine guns, quickly had the building surrounded, ready to kill anybody who could be a member of the guerilla group.
It appears as though most of the people injured and killed were innocent bystanders, and through the chaos, that wasn’t the group’s intention – they wanted to hold the supreme court justices’ hostage to put the president on trial – but I don’t know what they thought was actually going to happen if they stormed a government building with enough weapons to destroy the building and kill everyone in it. So indeed, all that actually happens is a lot of chaotic screaming and crying for an hour and a half as people try to figure out who’s dead and who isn’t.
Director Tomás Corredor has said that this movie is not supposed to be about war, it’s supposed to be about people. Some of that is reflected within the movie – there are no scenes of war action, it really is just people dying, people not knowing what’s going on or what to do next. But the part that doesn’t come through is that none of these characters are people – we know a handful of names, that’s it, the audience does not learn anything else about anybody in this movie.
The filmmakers have also said that this movie is not supposed to be a reflection of truth, it is not about what happened, but to get people to question what happened. In the aftermath, even all these decades later, the exact number of people killed or missing is not known. That is a hard hitting sombre reminder at the very end, and it does speak to how the film portrayed it: it was chaos. That chaos will mean something to everyone who lived through this or knows someone who had, but for everyone on the outside, it’s just random chaos.
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