The Justice Palace siege is one of the most dramatic events in the recent history of Colombia, one that we – Colombians - all think we know something about, but in which the particularity of the facts makes us know it only in a fragmentary way, plagued by opposing versions and, above all, an overwhelming silence. It is there, in the space of the historical void, where fiction appears as an instrument to imagine the moments of that specific event in which the complexity of the human condition comes to life, facing the adversity and helplessness of war, violence, confronting the impulse to stay alive and the resistance to preserve a minimum of human dignity. It is an event that contains a complex spectrum of shades of grey, where the parties dissolve, generating a boundless corpus of contradictions woven between the people in captivity over a span of hours, caught in the crossfire.

 

Noviembre is a period piece, entirely narrated inside one of the washrooms of the Colombian Justice Palace during the siege in 1985. In this space, more than 50 civilians lived for close to twenty-seven hours the brutality of a confrontation between their captors of the M-19 left-wing guerilla and the Armed Forces of the State. An armed confrontation they never chose to be part of. 

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Being solidly documented in many of the versions of the events that took place inside the Palace during the siege, focusing on this single space of the washroom brings me to the notion of confinement. This allows me to explore, by narrating off-camera, a milestone in Colombia’s lengthy armed conflict, of which several generations remember only some key snapshots: the arrival of the army’s tanks and their forced entrance to the Justice Palace building; the shooting of rockets; flying helicopters; gunfire; civilians running scared through the surrounding streets and the fatal blaze that finally destroyed the building. The before-mentioned elements are, in this film, built entirely from an inside perspective; from a minimal, intimate place; from inside of a public washroom in the besieged building. The confinement to one single space throughout the film helps me to contemplate the weight of this brutal event - not from the collective memory of an entire society generated by partial and polarized information, but from the singularity and fragility of the humans enclosed in that space during the long hours of the siege.

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In the off-screen construction, sound becomes a dynamizing factor of the action inside the washroom. It aims to evoke a similar sensation to when reading Cortazar's House Taken Over (Casa Tomada) and the overwhelming and imminent presence of the intruders (Los Invasores). The external sounds become a mental bridge connecting the visual experience as a trigger of reactions; the off-screen events, including the sounds, generate force, and provide insight into the intensities of the combat, where calm and silence convert into uncertainty, blurring the notion of "losers" and "winners."

 

Simultaneously, within the interior of the space, this connection occurs through a close examination of the physical and mental suffering of the confined group of people, of the increasing marks of violence on their bodies, their changing relations during the confinement and movement within that specific physical space of the washroom. In a way, the physical space becomes a protagonist, which degrades, like the people confined within, gradually documenting the cumulative marks of the combat.

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When exploring further the elements of the off-screen proposal, it is essential to underline that although Noviembre is based on a historical event in the Colombian internal armed conflict, I do not aim to make a war film as traditionally defined by the genre -  with tanks, explosions, troops. With regards to the spectacularism of war, there is already a vast number of images that, in my opinion, have lost their meaning due to the repetition, aestheticization, and hyper-coding of an entire genre, not only in cinema but also in the forms of advertisement as well as institutional communication and news images. What I believe is critical, and what I, therefore, wish to explore in my film, is the individual and also the collective human component in a situation of onset exacerbated violence, and through this, examine the universality of the human condition represented in the specific events of the Colombian Justice Palace siege. 

 

Inside the washroom of the building, there is no day or night, only that exhausting white fluorescent light that, sometimes, and for security reasons, the guerrillas order to turn off, plunging everything and everyone into overarching darkness. As time goes by, in the darkness, only the light of torches permits us to visualize what is in front of us. The lighting design, closely linked to the sound design, constitutes a vital component that delineates the progression and accumulation in time of the combat: inside the entire building, the electricity continuously fails due to the escalating detonations. This allows me to break off with the idea of one singular space – while remaining in one physical space: there is a gradual progression from the initial illumination of the washroom through the intermittency caused by the failures of the electric grid and the half-light to total darkness. The light is a powerful narrative element that enables me to show the oppression and the confinement, but also a component that supports the build-up of perception of the space. While cinema is about seeing and perceiving images, it is also about creating images psychologically. Films like Kinatay or Alpha, The Right to Kill (Brillante Mendoza), are tangible examples of the variating, non-constant lighting that, either in the half-light or in its total absence, generates in the spectator multiple sensations and understandings of reality. On the other hand, the addition of a more expressionistic narrative sound construction can create, in terms of such mental images, more complex emotions and atmospheres because, in the end, not seeing is also about being exposed to the presence of sensation, making this temporal limitation of the field of vision something beautiful and distressing.

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Time, as a formal element, is something I desire to explore in the construction of the ellipses by coupling them with the rapid degradation of the combat and intensity of the situation reflected in the very premature and constant deterioration of the physical space. The accumulation of papers, blood, fluids, waste, debris, bodies, and the permanent arrival of new characters to the site represents the way in which the already cramped space becomes progressively less habitable and how this impacts the characters in it. The passing of time is never stated in dialogue and, reinforcing the accumulation of objects and people, it becomes palpable in the progressive structural destruction of the washroom, which, subjected to the brutality of the military response, is transformed scene by scene until it becomes a ruin. That same time which, of course, is a condensed time, is, in turn, an element that, through the off-camera field, through the zones of light and total darkness, becomes a hermetic unit without external references, where somehow hours or months may have passed, but where exhaustion, accumulation, degradation, and devastation, are superimposed on any temporal measure.

 

While having outlined above the aspects of sound, light, and a temporal construction, the particularity of making a film in one single space lies in conceiving the set itself, yet another protagonist affected by war, in this case, represented in the textures that reveal the magnitude and brutality of the armed actions. In gradual degradation throughout the film, this set becomes a configuring device for representing suffering.

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In this aspect, Michael Haneke’s ability to use the build-up of a sense of danger and indirect violence as triggers for forceful sensory experiences is a source of inspiration. His films, such as Funny Games, The Seventh Continent, and Caché, provide spectator experiences that generate psychological images of tangible violence, in which blood becomes a trace that reveals brutality exercised off-screen.

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While, as beforementioned, the Justice Palace siege remains a complex historic event tainted by a lack of notion of a general “truth,” my main objective with this film is to explore the human condition in extreme situations. Therefore, it’s necessary to alternate between a variable and multiple points of view in the staging, in which we see and know what the focalizing characters see, feel, know, and perceive. Within a choral structure, each character relates to the others in the washroom, which is considered a transit space in normal conditions. In this event, the characters find themselves forcibly confined, interacting in a situation detached from any reference to their individual and collective notion of normality. I am interested in exploring the vision of the characters amidst an extreme situation in which these interchangeably complement and contradict each other without the eye of an omnipresent and omniscient narrator. With regards to formal structure, this exercise enables me to explore a fragmented look at the situation to build the despair of confinement as well as the overall desolate depiction of how people interact with their fellow victims when their condition is utterly powerless; it does not allow them to control absolutely anything and when there is nothing to do but to sit and wait to see what's next. Thus, in the search for each character's human condition, the siege's political discourse is relegated, giving way to the story's universality.

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By regulating the use of dialogues, the space acquires the characteristics of another body that acts and speaks. That is why, in its deterioration, I confront it as a corpse, almost from a forensic point of view, dissecting and digging into the physical damages, anticipating bringing to light fragments of genuineness hidden behind the official political discourse and story built around the tragic events of the siege of the Justice Palace, the official versions and what by some Colombians is considered as “the pact of silence.” Hence, that washroom becomes a corpse that, unlike the human one, speaks and does not lie.

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Further, another angle I am interested in exploring is the representative act: bearing in mind the multiple roles constituting a choral structure, casting becomes a crucial element that, in the intensity of the performance exercise, must be modulated by the filming device. By shooting the film in a studio, set in the script to happen in exact chronological order, the collective confinement in its choral form juxtapositions the total loss of intimacy in a space – the washroom - designated to be an intimate one. When filming, I anticipate conducting unannounced changes in the shooting plan, with which I hope to alter the established comfort of the actors in search of moments of innate natural response to unanticipated external stimuli.

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When understanding the project in the light of the current events we are experiencing as humanity, Noviembre not only explores the past but provides a reflection on the present and potentially also the future: the limited staging, forced confinement, and overcrowding, confronts the characteristic human fear of the “other” in an era of social distancing, a trend that for sure shapes and will continue conditioning human behavior.

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