‘One Year, One Night’: Battling the Trauma of Paris’ Bataclan Terrorist Attacks

variety.com:

Pretty well from when he started out in 2002, melding fiction, recreation and direct reportage in films that won him two San Sebastián Golden Shells but bamboozled more mainstream critics, Spain’s Isaki Lacuesta has maintained that he wanted to make larger audience movies.With his tenth feature, Berlin competition player “One Year, One Night,” taking in the 2015 Bataclan Paris terrorist attack, he finally has his chance.Produced by Lacuesta’s label La Termita Films and Spain’s Bambu Producciones, the company behind milestone Spanish TV shows “Grand Hotel,” “Velvet” and “Cable Girls,” “One Year, One Night” cost six times the budget of Lacuesta’s most expensive film before that, the director says.

It stars Argentina’s Nahuel Pérez (“BPM (Beats Per Minute)”) and Noémie Merlant (“Portrait of a Lady on Fire”), two of the most admired young actors currently working in France, and it’s backed by the distribution and sales muscle of Studiocanal, which took a minority stake in Bambu in 2016.“I’ve never tried to make films of a size whose budget I didn’t have,” says Lacuesta.

In the case of “One Year, One Night,” however, his budget allowed him to shoot the tremendously complex evacuation of the Bataclan nightclub.In other ways, however, the film remains very much of a piece with Lacuesta’s work to date.

What sets Lacuesta apart, suggests Bambu’s Ramón Campos, is “his love of his characters, their voices.”“I remember [Berlin Fest artistic director] Carlos Chatrian once saying that my films have a strong sense of empathy towards their characters, which exploring the depiction of memory,” Lacuesta agrees.One key to the film, Lacuesta says, is its title.