Night Shot
Visión Nocturna
CHILE / 2019 / Spanish / Color / DCP / 80 min
Director: Carolina Moscoso Briceño
Script: Carolina Moscoso Briceño, María Paz González
Editing: Juan Eduardo Murillo
Sound Design: Mercedes Gaviria
Music: Camila Moreno
Producer: Macarena Aguiló Marchi
Production Company: El Espino Films
World Sales: Compañía de Cine
Eight years ago, the director suffered a devastating rape, yet the alleged assailant claimed innocence and was let off without charge. The victim was left with nothing but distrust for the police and medical institutions that further scarred her mind and body. Then a film student, she employed her camera to record a diary even after the incident. Here, she uses this footage to expose her unutterable emotions in essay form—her day-to-day existence carrying these open wounds interacting with family and friends, attending a healing ceremony—overexposed or in the “night shot” mode of the title and layered over with an elaborate acoustical design. How does one live with the physical and mental scars of sexual violence? Joining the director on a journey that began in the depths of despair, we bear witness with her at its destination.
[Director’s Statement] If I could write what happened after the rape, I would say that it was an abysmal feeling, out of which nothing I had felt previously was able to re-emerge. Millions of emotions were prevented from being hidden or sorted out. To this chaos they now returned, as clues to help me see the images I had made with my first camera, at age 15. A habit of filming that remained after the rape.
Research carried out for this film, the letter sent to me by my mother, the rapes that occur every day, led me to seek reopening the unfinished trial against the rapist. But he committed the crime as a minor and the statute of limitations prevented me. There is nothing to do, there will be no fault, and this finding becomes part of the movie. Justice does not operate in cases of rape.
I enter a path of dark, fragile, and insistent areas, where cinema, above all, has sprouted and remained inseparable from me, to help me think. I repeatedly urge myself to interrogate this wound and the film that emerges might resemble the long conversation I have with it.
Everyday, women are raped. Not only in Chile, but throughout America and the world. And not only today, but it’s been the same for millennia. We are all in this reality, conveniently silenced so far. This silence is one reason for making the film, but also, I was trying to tell my internal experience, after a break. A path that is also the path of anyone who has ever suffered. I made this film to reflect on the pain left by any wound, looking for an image of the oscillating and dizzying experience of living.
Carolina Moscoso BriceñoDirector and editor of film and television who studied at the University of Chile, with a master’s in Creative Documentary from Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. She has worked as director and editor for several video clips, animation, visual and theater projects. Night Shot is her first documentary film. She is currently developing her next film, Nunca ser policía, and is working on the editing of Históricas, directed by Javiera Court and Grace Lazcano.