Shooting entirely at night and literally plunging the audience in the dark would seem a risky bet for most documentary filmmakers, but not for Alejandro Alonso Estrella, the director of the bold History is written at night. No clue or landmark in sight to hint at where the film is set. Against a fully dark backdrop, faces of people furtively appear on screen, only visible in the reflection of a campfire or an electric torch, like ghosts. Hands reach out to a fire for warmth with a faint red glow. Giant crabs silently crawl up the wall of a house bathed in moonlight, exuding a sense of eeriness. Scene after scene, a fantastical atmosphere sets in.
And yet, this is the harsh reality Cuban people are now facing. The COVID-19 pandemic triggered the worst political crisis in over 60 years on the island, with disastrous socio-economic consequences. Symbol of this deliquescence, power blackouts have become the norm for the population, literally plunging the island in the dark for hours on end. A sad déjà vu for Alejandro, who grew up during the “Special Period” in the 1990s, when the fall of the Soviet Union, the Cuban regime’s main ally during the Cold War, triggered a long economic crisis, marked by severe food shortages and power outages.
Back then, Alejandro found his escape from these troubled times and a sense of community at a local arthouse cinema, opening his eyes to the limitless possibilities of film as a medium to create his own world. It eventually led him to study filmmaking. Deeply influenced by ethnographic films and genre-defying works of the likes of the notoriously unclassifiable Chantal Ackermann, he saw documentary filmmaking as a way to “build very personal universes, where the exploration of cinematic genres like science fiction or the fantastic challenges the notions of reality and history, both personal and collective.” The director’s own family history is indeed a constant in his filmography, especially through the presence of his mother. The film begins with her telling him about a dream, a familiar scene for Alejandro, who grew up listening to her stories about visions and spirits, revolving around his spiritualist grandparents. While the director’s grandmother was revered in her community as a santera, a practitioner of Cuba’s unique religion worshiping spirits known as oricha, his grandfather was famous as much for being a revolutionary leader as for his healing powers. That family legacy permeates the whole film, giving it a sense of intimacy while connecting it with Cuba’s history and traditions.
Alejandro’s very personal narrative weaves itself into those of the anonymous Cubans living on the margins he turns his lens on. Armed with only a small camera, he spent 5 years scouring the island filming blackouts impromptu, as they often caught him unawares, collecting fragments of spaces and encounters with people. The result is a meticulously crafted collage of faces and hands highlighted against the dark, a delicate clair obscur in motion. No sign of cliché classic cars nor imagery of revolutionary heroes à la Buena Vista Social Club here. In this phantasmagorical atmosphere, devoid of space and time markers, the audience is brought to a standstill. “I wanted to invite the viewer to reconstruct, through the sensory experience, everything that the darkness was hiding from him” explains Alejandro. This makes watching the film a powerful experience, as distance with the people on screen seems to dissolve and one feels they could be sitting around that campfire with them, waiting for the light to come back on.
Alejandro likens the process of making the film to alchemy, experimenting with different elements, transcending cinematic genres to reach this delicate balance between documentary observation, emotion and political message. As Cuba is literally and metaphorically plunged into the dark, History is written at night is “an act of resistance, to drive away the darkness”, explains the director. Turning the light on the people left behind becomes a political gesture as much as a search for hope. The film is all the more important that the world remains mostly ignorant of the extent of the current tragedy Cuba is facing. With one million people emigrating last year alone, the country is emptying at an alarming pace. Those who decide to stay must cope with strong repression and censorship from the regime. Alejandro himself left when he got offered a residency by the Spanish Film Academy and has lived in Spain for the past three years.
Although the film has not been screened in Cuba yet because of the government’s relentless censorship, it has graced festivals abroad, making the director realize how much the world remains unaware of the plight of his island and people. While some may mistake History is written at night for a dystopian fiction, it is sadly the painful reality of a country that the director compares to “a body in a state of decay”. Finding himself in the strange position of observing his own island as an outsider, he continues to make films to create his own vision of Cuba. A challenge that he duly embraces, keeping the darkness at bay, one film at a time.
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