This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Privacy Overview
Strictly Necessary Cookies
Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.
If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.
3rd Party Cookies
This website uses Google Analytics to collect anonymous information such as the number of visitors to the site, and the most popular pages.
Keeping this cookie enabled helps us to improve our website.
Please enable Strictly Necessary Cookies first so that we can save your preferences!
Director's Statement
What is left of a man after everything has been stripped away? Uncommunicated, isolated in time, with no stimuli and no tangible place to hold on to, his own senses start to betray him. But deep inside there is something that nobody can take away: his imagination. A twelve-year night is, above all, a descent into the abyss. Based on a true story, it shows how three men were gradually dispossessed of everything that made them individuals over 12 years. They endured a physical and mental process designed to drive them insane with the ultimate goal of destroying any resistance within their deepest selves. They were forced to re-invent themselves from the remainders of their human condition in order to resist one of the most sinister ordeals imaginable.
As director and writer, this project has taken me more than four years of research and documentation. One of the key challenges was to avoid making a prison film, but rather an existential journey. The military order was very clear: “Since we couldn’t kill them, we will drive them insane.” Beyond a meticulous historical re-creation of the events, I sought to portray an aesthetic and sensory journey, allowing the audience to experience how to survive such an inner battle.
The three actors (Antonio de la Torre, Chino Darín and Alfonso Tort) had to undergo a very demanding mental and physical conditioning program (each lost around 15 kilos) in order to bring us closer to the extreme circumstances they suffered. The staging aimed to make us feel next to them, immersing us in the struggle that a man orchestrates in order to remain human.
It was a dark journey, but also a very rewarding one. Full of complexities and challenges, the film re-affirmed my belief that, even in those moments when circumstances may lead us to believe that everything is lost, human strength and endurance should never be underestimated.