Paolo Tizón shot 240 hours of footage for a 95-minute film, and he’ll tell you he had no idea what he was doing. That’s not modesty. It’s method. Night Has Come, his first feature, embedded him for ten months with young recruits training for the Peruvian special forces, the ones bound for the VRAEM region where the country grows most of its coca. The film world-premiered in the Proxima Competition at Karlovy Vary in 2024 and walked out with both the Special Jury Prize and the FIPRESCI award for best film in the section. It did that without a script, without narration, without a single line of explanatory text, and, by the director’s own account, without a plan.
When Marcus Mizelle first watched it, he didn’t clock it as a documentary at all. It looked too composed, too cinematic, like designed fiction. That reaction is the whole game for Tizón, who treats the documentary-versus-fiction line as a question about how a film gets made, not how it lands on you.
Not Knowing as a Working Method
Most first features over-plan, because planning feels like control and a first-timer wants control. Tizón did the opposite on purpose. He brought a camera, followed his instinct, and kept rolling.
I cannot make a film if I know what I’m going after and I have a really clear storyboard.
He frames the unknown as the actual engine of the work, the thing that keeps him amazed at what he’s capturing, as if someone else were making the film and handing it to him. There’s a long observational tradition behind this, the Direct Cinema lineage that lets a camera sit in a room until the room forgets it’s there. Tizón’s twist is the sheer volume. Frederick Wiseman, he learned, shoots around 400 hours, which gave Tizón permission to shoot hundreds of his own. The risk of that approach is obvious: you can film forever and never find the movie. The reward is that you’re rolling when the unrepeatable thing happens, and in a boot camp full of teenagers being broken down and rebuilt, the unrepeatable thing happens constantly.
A Camera on One Shoulder
Tizón shot the film himself, and that single fact shapes everything. He talks about the camera the way an addict talks about a habit, a magic portal he can disappear into, and he’s clear that the feeling of Night Has Come lives in that relationship rather than in any staged moment or performance. The energy flows through the lens because the same person holding it is the person thinking the film’s thoughts.
This puts him in the company of Kirsten Johnson, whose Cameraperson argues that the operator’s body, their flinches and instincts and attention, is itself the authorship of a documentary. Marcus described the same phenomenon from his own current project, a Los Angeles private-investigator documentary he’s been shooting for two and a half years: filming a key witness leaving a hundred-year-old’s birthday party, he let the exposure blow out to pure white as the man walked from inside to outside, a half-conscious visual cue about time and mortality that arrived because he was the one behind the camera and his head was already in the edit. Hand that setup to a hired DP and the shot is competent. It isn’t that.
What Beau Travail Taught Him
The film Tizón kept returning to is Claire Denis’s Beau Travail, her 1999 study of a French Foreign Legion officer undone by jealousy in Djibouti.
What he took from it was not subject matter, though both films live in the closed world of military training. It was permission and a way of looking. Beau Travail regards men’s bodies with tenderness, an almost erotic attention that sits strangely and powerfully against the hardness of soldiering, and it moves with total freedom, dropping pop music and classical fiction grammar into a film that answers to no one but Denis. Tizón wanted that gaze: to watch these recruits with affection rather than the testosterone-soaked language of a Saving Private Ryan. The contrast is the point. A teenager doing brutal log drills at night, filmed with care, becomes a person instead of a unit.
He found these kids more broken than fearsome, many of them craving the simple fact of being asked what they thought. As Tizón put it, the camera became a kind of relief, the first thing in their lives that treated their inner experience as worth recording.
The Politics Hidden in the Approach
Here is where I’ll take a position the conversation circles but never quite states outright. Tizón insists the film isn’t political in the speechmaking sense, that it works through image and sensation rather than argument. But the refusal to explain is the argument. By declining to glorify the institution or to condemn it, by simply staying close enough to see fragile masculinity under the violence, he makes a film that asks what these institutions are even for and leaves the question open.
Nowadays to humanize someone feels like you want to make them look good, but the human needs a full spectrum.
That’s the ethic underneath the whole method. The 240 hours, the no-script discipline, the tender gaze borrowed from Denis: all of it serves a refusal to flatten these young men into either heroes or monsters. Compare it to Restrepo, the embedded Afghanistan documentary that puts you in the firefight; that film earns its power through adrenaline and proximity to combat. Night Has Come goes the other way, finding its charge in downtime, in the faces between the drills, in the quiet that the army usually edits out. The most violent thing in the film is often a held look, not a gunshot. That’s a choice, and it’s the choice that lets the recruits register as kids first and soldiers second, which is the only way the closing question lands with any weight.
Serving the Film
For all his talk of not knowing, Tizón is precise about one thing: the director works for the film, not the reverse. Editing the 240 hours with Martín Sola, he describes a process of listening to what the material wanted rather than forcing it into a shape he’d decided in advance. The footage speaks, the people in it guide where it goes, and the job is to stay open and un-stubborn long enough to hear it. It’s the same humility that made him keep the camera running for ten months, now pointed at the edit.
It’s also, he admits, terrifying to hand over. He’d been dreaming about the premiere, literally, one night in Mexico, once underwater with snacks, the recruits somehow in the audience. After a first film made with whatever resources he had, the festival is a new and overwhelming country: distribution conversations, delivery logistics, the strange business of letting a private thing become public. He wants to be present for it, to watch his film on a big screen and have a couple of drinks and actually feel the thing he made.
Asked for advice, he didn’t offer a technique. He offered a state. He feels alive when he’s making a film, close to people he’d never otherwise have met, reflecting back on himself through them. For a director who built his debut on the principle that you should never quite know what you’re doing, that might be the one thing he’s sure of.
