‘918 Gau (918 nights)’: Confessions in front of the camera

Winner at the Pontevedra Novos Cinemas Festival, DocLisboa and Torino Festival, ‘918 Gau (918 nights)’, the documentary by director Arantza Santesteban, arrives in commercial theatersin which she recounts the stay of almost three years in which she was detained in custody for a crime of integration into a terrorist group by participating in a clandestine meeting in Batasuna, together with other leaders of the outlawed party. A tremendously personal proposal, in which the documentary director tries to be the narrator of her own story.

Beyond political assessments, The main problem with ‘918 Gau’ is that it tries to be such a personal story that it does not give rise to a dialogue with the viewer. Its narrative pace is excessively slow, making the 65 minutes of the film’s duration become infinite. Nor does it help that she chose to cover part of his arrest with scenes that are mere scans of official documentaries. Yes, he coldly shows how he was arrested, thus avoiding any attempt to romanticize the event. However, the presentation is so hieratic that it gives the impression that Santesteban herself trivializes it.

On the other hand, it should be a chronicle of his time in prison. In principle, the documentary is, since you can hear a voiceover telling about Santesteban’s stay in prison. However, his story remains only superficial, it does not deal with the newspaper, the newspaper, it only grants a respite to the public when it tells how one of the prisoners ended up delirious due to imprisonment. More depth is lacking here, evoking the days as if they were narrations in a diary, using static or archival images.

Lack of reflection exercise

Santesteban demands that audiences listen to his monologue without providing a truly cinematic aspect. On the other hand, there comes a time when the tape stops talking about imprisonment and begins to tell about his days out of prison. At this point, she could make more and better use of the scenarios of freedom … but no, she gets lost in sequences that contribute nothing and that only create situations of apparent contemplation, which is a way of masking boredom.

‘918 Gau’ doesn’t even work as a fragmented memory exercise, Santesteban misses a great opportunity to tell his point of view on his days in prison, chooses not to do even an exercise in reflection and wastes the few archive images he uses. What could have been a film in the style of “The Metamorphosis of the Birds”, in which Catarina Vasconcelos paid homage to her family heritage by combining her own archive images with others that evoked the past, daydreams and sequences that gave a certain aura of magical realism; it becomes an exercise that seems done for one’s own contemplation. A missed opportunity for a director who seemed to have a much more innovative vision.

Note 3

The best: His premise indicated a different documentary exercise.

Worse: There are scenes that do not contribute to anything, the images are too static, there is no intention of telling the testimony with an artistic gaze.