Solos en la Noche (Alone in the Night) is set during the coup d’état of February 23, 1981. During that night, Guillermo Rojas, the film’s director, allows us to see how the stories of a group of friends intertwine. Despite the terror and uncertainty, they decide to raise their voices, not only for a country in transition that cannot afford such a setback, but also for themselves, because, as the protagonists express, it is very difficult to be a coward in a world for the brave.
At GoAragón, we had the opportunity to interview Guillermo Rojas and Beatriz Arjona, who plays “Carmen” in the film, on the occasion of its nomination at the Saraqusta Film Festival.
When did your love for cinema begin? And at what point did you decide you wanted to pursue it professionally?
Beatriz Arjona: My training and all my experience were in theater. I studied at the ESAD (School of Dramatic Arts) in Seville, but I realized that the first few times I stood in front of a camera, I was too expressive. There came a point where I even had to tie my hands down. I would say to myself, “Bea, you have to work with your eyes and your expression, with something small.” I really wanted to train, so I went to Madrid to study film, because ever since I was little I had watched the classic films of my generation, I watched adventure films with my father, like The Goonies, The Crystal Labyrinth, Willow, and there was something about them that made me think, “I want to be there.” Besides, I’m a film buff, not just as an actress; I go to the movies every week, and something in me has always had that love for cinema. Now, I couldn’t decide between theater or film, it’s like mom or dad.
Guillermo Rojas: I think I’ve always had that restlessness. Since I was little, I always liked stories, I liked movies, and I grew up thinking that I wanted to write the things I was seeing. So, from a very young age, I remember writing, then I had a video camera when I was young, and that’s where I started making my own stories, my own family recordings, my own short films. Little by little, the vocation came naturally, but I knew I wanted to devote myself to cinema from the age of eight or nine, and I became more and more interested. When I got to university, where I studied at the Faculty of Communication in Seville, I really enjoyed meeting people who had the same interests as me, which is something I didn’t have so much in high school. It was at university when I said, “Wow! There are other people like me, I’m not so alone.”
Many of your works, Guillermo, are related to history. Where does this interest come from?
GR: I couldn’t say. I guess I’m a curious person who likes to know where things come from and find ways to link them to the present and the future. I think it’s important that cinema can be, in addition to entertainment, a tool for transforming society, helping us understand where we come from in order to see where we’re going. So I found it interesting, and it’s something I think I’ll continue working on. But I think it comes naturally to me. For example, Solos en la noche starts from something as personal as wanting to know what my parents were like when they were young and how they lived through a very important time in their lives. It didn’t start out as a project to revisit Spanish history, but rather something much smaller, more personal, I would say almost selfish, like “I’m going to try to see what my parents were like when they were young and how they felt.”
How did you manage to remain historically accurate while also making an entertaining film with a comical tone?
GR: Well, I’ll tell you that I never wanted to paint a historically accurate picture, but rather I was interested in recreating the emotions that the people of this country experienced on that night. When you watch the film with a magnifying glass, you’ll see things that may not be entirely realistic, but the idea wasn’t to make a faithful, minute-by-minute account of what happened on 23 February, but rather to portray the feelings and emotions that Spaniards experienced that day. That gave us a lot of freedom when it came to tackling the comedy, because life, although it has a lot of comedy in it, still has a different structure or tone from comedy in the movies. I think that freedom and the fact that neither the cast nor the crew had experienced the coup firsthand gave us the distance that I think made it easier for us to present that moment in this way. Perhaps if I had experienced the coup firsthand, or if the coup hadn’t ended the way it did, we wouldn’t have made a comedy film.
BA: Guille has always given us a lot of freedom when it comes to building our characters. We weren’t constrained in the sense that we had to say “recórcholis” or those things that were said in ’81. We just had to not stray too far from the context, even though we had freedom. The truth is that, from the beginning, from the first reading, and when Guille told me he had thought of me for this character, I saw myself as very similar to her in many ways, not in all, obviously, but those things helped me to become the woman of 1981. That made me realize that you can tell not only the historical context, but also how we act in that particular historical context. For example, my character, Carmen, is quite revolutionary for that time, but it’s true that there are some comments, even from her towards other women, that obviously now, in 2025, wouldn’t even cross my mind. But that freedom did make us live the situation more, without seeking comedy. As happened to me with the character of Carmen, the comedy is not sought after, but rather it is so overwhelming that her situations become comical for the audience, but not for her, of course, she is suffering and living it 100%. That made me forget, in the moment, the comical aspect.
Beatriz, as you said, Carmen is a very revolutionary character, and she undergoes a very important evolution during the film. How do you approach a role like that as an actress?
BA: For me it was a gift, although it sounds cliché, but sometimes it happens that, as a performer, you don’t have the possibility or the opportunity to be given certain characters because the audiovisual world is sometimes governed by your appearance or the profile you give. And sometimes it seems that people forget that actors are people who can play many different types of characters. Then these opportunities for characters that you wouldn’t normally be offered come along. For example, Carmen is a character who, because of her profile, there have even been people who have seen the film and then don’t recognize me. And they say, “Oh, but it’s you,” because they’re stuck with the image of who you are beforehand. That’s why it was such a gift for me, first because the hair and costume work was amazing, I didn’t see myself anywhere, I saw my mother. That helped me a lot to get into the historical context and into Carmen’s life. And then, as you just said, the journey she goes on from beginning to end was a lot of fun. Not having so many limits, when cinema is sometimes about control, looks, and everything being internal, whereas Carmen is the opposite. Although that also scared me, I asked Guille if it was happening to me, but he encouraged me to keep going. Having a director who gives you freedom and gives you that character and the opportunity to play it like that, has really been a gift.
Guillermo Rojas and Beatriz Arjona at the Saraqusta Film Festival press conference
And for you, Guillermo, how was the documentation and research process?
GR: Well, it was a very long process. Because I think I’ve had this story in my head for almost 20 years, remembering things my parents told me, reading the press at the time, and talking to many of my parents’ friends about how they lived that day. It was like a study, like an ant, little by little, growing inside me as I drank deeply from other sources, from books that had been written, essays, films about the period. At first, I wasn’t even sure if I was going to make a film; I thought I would write a novel or even a play. At that point, I was more focused on figuring out what the background was going to be, and in the end, the film came out more naturally. The process itself was very beautiful because it also allowed me to see and understand how these people who are older than me, who lived through a key moment in the history of this country, felt, and to discover that when they were in their twenties, they felt the same fears that I felt 30 years later. There is also something beautiful about that connection between time.
I imagine that on a more personal level, it also helped you to better understand what it was like for your parents. How did they react when they saw the film, as people who actually lived through the coup?
GR: Well, in my mother’s case, she had, I wouldn’t say a conflict, but when she saw it, she said to me a lot: “Oh, it didn’t really happen like that.” There were many things in the film that she had told me about, and then I fictionalized them, exaggerated other things, or changed them. So it depends a bit on the person, maybe some people focus more on the appearance and others focus more on the substance. At first, my mother focused much more on the appearance, but then she understood that that wasn’t the important thing, but rather seeing how they felt, how we reflected the era through the setting, the songs, the costumes, the color, and that’s something you don’t get at first glance, but it seeps through your pores and sinks in, and in the end that’s what’s important: that people don’t focus on the appearance, on the striking events of that day, but that what those people felt sinks in somehow.
BA: My parents really liked it, and so did all the generations of my family. Although it’s true that I was also very nervous on the day of the first screening, because Guillermo’s mother was there and I knew that there was a part of her in my character, but in the end it was very exciting and it was very nice to represent the women of that time. It was a source of pride to see how they saw themselves reflected in that sense. We’ve had very positive feedback from viewers. What’s more, it’s part of our history and it’s been half forgotten, it seems to have been reduced to an anecdote, but it happened, and what the film reminds us is that we’re not so far away, neither from this group of friends, nor from the possibility that at any moment things could change and we could lose our rights. I think that’s what’s reaching the audience, and the response from that generation has been wonderful.
And how have people from other generations, younger people who haven’t experienced the coup d’état, reacted?
GR: I expected a colder reaction, but I think younger people have come to understand the underlying theme of the film, which is the fear of living your life when you start to encounter difficulties, the fear of responsibility, the fear of expressing your opinion, the fear of losing the rights you thought you didn’t have and which are gradually slipping away. Often, those of us who are older think that those who come after us have no interests or ideas or concerns, but I feel the same today at 42 as I did when I was 16, and sometimes I think we look down on the people who come after us. Just like I feel about people who are older than me, I think they are simply people who were born before me and have experienced things that I haven’t yet, and young people will experience them too, but deep down we are all the same. So, I think young people do connect in some way with that human side of the film, because you shouldn’t look down on a 13-, 15-, or 22-year-old boy or girl; they can also feel fear in their lives, they can feel desire, they can feel love. The film plays a little with the idea that that connection should never be lost.
BA: I think it’s important that we always stay close to young people, both in cinema and in any kind of cultural activity, because everything is memory and remembrance, to detect what happened, to try to prevent it from happening again in the present. And sometimes it seems that the system makes us live with our backs turned, that it tries to distance us, when it should be the opposite; now we need to be closer. And young people who have seen the film have suddenly reacted. In Guillermo’s script, through the characters, especially Paco, there is a lot of talk about that, about sitting down, reflecting, talking, we are human, everyone has political views, but above all there must be humanity. We all live on the same planet and we have to make life a little easier for each other. People are very moved by it, and I see that it also reaches young people because we are talking about the same thing. It’s a different context, but unfortunately and fortunately, the same things continue to happen to us. We continue to fall in love, but we continue to die; we continue to have catastrophes, but at the same time we have wonderful things; as friends, we continue to come together. I think it’s a film that talks about life, and it also talks about what I mentioned before, that everything is great right now, but be careful, because if you don’t go out and defend and protect your rights, this can change at any moment, and what you are experiencing or enjoying thanks to your ancestors who fought for you to be here, can be lost.
Finally, I wanted to ask you what you expect from this nomination at Saraqusta.
GR: We are delighted to be participating in the festival, to have it seen in a setting dedicated to historical cinema and to attract the attention of viewers. Just being here is enough, because it gives the film new visibility. It is still touring festivals and cultural centers, it is also being screened outside Spain, and we remain very receptive and delighted with all the good things that are happening to it. So we’re delighted to be back in Zaragoza with it.
BA: Very happy, I haven’t been able to come to Zaragoza for a long time and I’m delighted to be here, to enjoy the weekend at the festival, to see the screenings of my colleagues, I’m really looking forward to it because I’m fascinated by everything related to history. And as Guille said, we’re very happy that the film is being seen in a historical festival context, because other times it just seems like a comedy. And well, fingers crossed to see what happens with the nomination.
