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THE CLOSURES, 72min., France
Directed by Lucia Arellano
After many years, Rafael decides to report the principal of his school for sexual assault. As part of the process he had to give his testimony in the same building where his guerrilla father was murdered at the hands of the police.

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Director Statement

Rafael is a prism through which we observe another space-time. From Belgium we want to look at Peru, and from the present we want to look at the past. The memories suspended in Rafael’s memory reappear according to the circumstances in which he lives and what
pursue him in the present.

Duality is the axis of the formal approach of our work. There is duality between the images and the voice-over, like two languages that are juxtaposed. There is duality between two silences, the silence around sexual abuse and the silence around the father. To each Silence corresponds to one story and one half of the film.

The images show us the present, that is, a week at the end of autumn in Brussels.

We see the daily life of a happy, composed family, in which everything is security and confidence in the future. They are banal images: taking her daughter to the park, going to the carousel on the Grand Place, preparing for the feast of Saint Nicholas. Along with these situations, they expect the moving to the new apartment that they have just bought and that will be the step to a new stage in the family’s life.

Rafael’s voice-over, reflective, sometimes funny, sometimes childish, transports us to another place, takes us to Peru, and to another time, to the past. He takes us back to his childhood, when he began to suffer violence from the principal of his school. Rafael tells us about that silence and then moves on to another silence, around the death of his father and his militancy. He takes us even further, telling the story of Micaela Bastidas in the 18th century, after whom he takes his daughter’s name.

The image of his father is a duality in itself, a person who participated in the armed conflict in his country, both a victim and a victimizer. This situation creates anguish in Rafael that even now he does not know how to process. Understanding the complexity of this duality is where we want to take viewers of this psychic path.

We imagine this film as two parallel paths: on the one hand, a sensory experience on the theme of a family in Brussels, pastel colors, the constantly gray sky, eternal underground transport that leads nowhere.
On the other hand, we hear a story that is both intimate and political, where personal history and history of a country are found in a character: Rafael, orphan of a guerrilla, the son of a terrorist. In our minds we visualize the Lurigancho neighborhood, the economic difficulties of his childhood, the abuse, the stigma.

We want to use atonal, electroacoustic music that takes us to a hallucinatory dimension, that allows us to see the gray sky of Lima behind the autumn sky of Brussels.

Only at the end of the film does the voice connect with the image, and the character speaks directly to the camera: it is time to make “the closings,” as Rafael calls them.