Few challenges are harder to rise to for a young filmmaker, making her first feature film, than the one Carolina Moscoso set herself: to make a film based on the rape she was the victim of eight years before, when she was a film school student. Few projects necessitate like this one to invent an absolutely singular language to speak about the absolute singular experience it has been. The terror of the event, and the shadow it casts over life as it goes on, altered, durably darkened. Visión nocturna. The title refers to a function that allows digital cameras to film at night, to see in the dark, by enhancing their sensitivity. In order to give form to this darkness, Carolina Moscoso coordinates two kinds of contrasting materials and narrative modes. A silent linear account, via a text printed on shots or on a dark background, establishes the naked facts of the rape and its violence, prolonged by a legal process that failed to acknowledge it and to see justice done. In the background or in the gaps of this account, the editing arranges disparate fragments out of the raw footage that she has been shooting for the past fifteen years, as a kind of diary. Joyful, carefree scenes with friends, or solitary impressions, only the director knows how the shadow of the rape is cast over these pieces of her past. No comment, no explanation reveals the secret. Only by delving into the silence, and cultivating this secret, does Visión nocturna pull off the impossible feat of sharing the unsharable. (C.N.)
Film presentation by the director
