A Twelve-Year Night

In 1973 the Uruguayan military took three men from the Tupamaro movement and gave them a category of their own: not prisoners but hostages, held alone, silent, often without light, for years. One was Mauricio Rosencof, one was Eleuterio Fernández Huidobro, and one was José Mujica, later president of the country. Álvaro Brechner refuses to make this heroic. His subject is how much a mind takes and what it does when it stops taking it. Antonio de la Torre's Mujica barely speaks in whole stretches of the film, and light and silence are handled as scarce resources so the length of the dark registers. It played in Horizons at Venice in 2018. Who it is for: viewers interested in the Latin American dictatorships and in prison narratives. Who it is not for: anyone claustrophobic, since almost all of it happens in cells.