Film Review: «A Twelve-Year Night», «La noche de 12 años»

This is a new section for VALENCIARTIST that I, as a lover of film, want to share with all of my readers and followers. Movies…some…are like good books. They teach us, they reach out and touch our hearts, they populate our memory and they provoke us to come back to them, sometimes over and over again. This happened to me with this film from 2018. When I first saw it I sort of just glanced by it without thinking too much. Now I have watched it again and so many things about it jumped out at me that I had to write this review.

First I thought I was a big «fan» of Pepe Mujica, (José Alberto Mujica Cordano, born in Montevideo, Uruguay on the 20th of May 1935). He was the 40th president of his country, from 2010 to 2015. And the movie is about his life, or should I say, about a part of his life that spans a few years before he became a politician and president. So therefore I immediately liked the movie. Again, or so I thought…

But now I see the movie, directed by Álvaro Brechner, (Uruguayan film director and writer who lives in Spain), in a totally different light. I now see that it is nothing more than a propaganda film. The writer, the same Álvaro Brechner, is trying to say that the atrocities committed by a right wing military government are horrible, true and unequivocal violations of Human Rights. But is he not aware that his protagonists were terrorists? Of course not. To him they were «freedom-fighters» because he does not bother to mention that his protagonist and all those others who, supposedly, suffered abuses were communists trying to take over the country.

Although I am not a defender of any type of dictatorship, or of any type of totalitarian, or authoritarian regime, I do understand that sometimes governments have to do things to guarantee that communists do not take over power. That was what the Uruguayan government was doing back in the sixties and seventies. The government was trying to protect the future of the country that was threatened by the Tupamaros who were terrorising the population.

Pepe Mujica was a terrorist. He formed part of the Tupamaros, who were nothing more than an armed insurgent group of urban guerrillas that were trying to disrupt civil order and topple the government of Uruguay. Naturally the government had to have a policy of containment. In the film we see the reaction of the government at work on a young Mujica arrested and imprisoned for his participation in the terrorist group. Then we see endless scenes of how he was mistreated and how he barely managed to survive the dungeons where he was made to live for twelve years.

The movie is worth seeing but do not be fooled. Yes, if this was true, then the treatment was inhumane and unacceptable. But why is it always one sided? Where are the films showing how the communists treat their political prisoners? There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence and first hand narratives from prisoners released from Cuba’s dungeons that had to endure insufferable conditions for far longer than Mr. Mujica had to. Yet, no one makes films decrying the abuses of communist regimes. It seems…according to Hollywood and other film producers…that the only governments that commit such atrocities are right wing ones. And this, my friends, is propaganda.

«A Twelve Year Night» is on Netflix. Take a look, let me know what you think…

Cheers…