Juana Acosta (Cali, 1976) has been lucky in ‘They arrived at night’ to meet the real person she plays, Lucía, the cleaner who at dawn on November 16, 1989 witnessed the killing of six priests Jesuits, including Ignacio Ellacuría, and two employees of the Central American University (UCA) in San Salvador. The government blamed the FMLN guerrillas, but Lucía saw that the culprits were Army soldiers. The object of savage interrogations by the CIA, she and her family ended up leaving the country and living in California, where the director Imanol Uribe and the actress herself met with her.
‘They arrived at night’, in competition at the Malaga Festival and in theaters from this Friday, March 25, is seen at all times from the point of view of Acosta’s character, who has also suffered violence firsthand. At the age of 16, his father was murdered in a crime that remains unpunished. Fifteen years later, his brother, unable to get over it, took her own life. After a lifetime without talking about it, the actress exorcises her grief in a dance show with which she is touring all over Spain these days, ‘El perdón’.
-What caught your attention when you met the real Lucía?
-That she is a woman with a lot of kindness and innocence, a really good person. She is moved by a feeling of enormous gratitude that she has towards the priests. She tells the truth to honor the memory of her parents. Meeting Lucía was a gift. She opened up to me and told me everything without shame. She helped me a lot to build the character, I had time to get into her head. We read the script together and she told me what was happening to her at each moment in the story, when she was most afraid or most uncertain. I will always thank you.
-Are you a believer?
-No, unlike Lucia. I was not baptized when I was born, my parents were very respectful, because they decided that I should choose it. My daughter is not baptized either. But the beautiful thing about this job is that you have to get into ways of seeing the world that are different from yours. This character is far removed from me. That’s what we actors are for, to transform ourselves.
-‘They arrived at night’ acquires another meaning these days with the war in Ukraine.
-Yes, good people always have to lose. It’s terrible how the film contains the exact images we see these days on television, families fleeing the horror of war with a white flag and despair in their eyes. Having to leave your home, your country… And face a new life without wanting to. Today the public is even more sensitized, because we are experiencing it here next door. Thirty years later, the human being does not advance. That violence resonated with me because in my country, Colombia, we have been shedding blood for decades. At the age of 16, I lived through the murder of my father. Lucía told me that she didn’t have a father, and that those priests were like her father. There we connected and then I understood what she had experienced.
-It took him thirty years to talk about his father.
-Before I did not speak about it publicly, but the time came to lose my fear, a mysterious impulse that led me to place that pain somewhere. We are going through very difficult times in societies polarized by anger and hatred. And I want to help break the circle of violence so as not to perpetuate it. When they hurt you, you want to return with the same coin, that is animal and human. The murderers of the Jesuits are still free in El Salvador, which is why this family cannot return to their country.
Do you think about your father every day?
-Yeah. You never get over a loss like this, you learn to live with it. My father was an exceptional being. Although he has done therapy in the past, something moves when I get in touch with such painful issues. For me, acting has saved my life. What do you do with violence? Do you keep perpetuating it? Another option is to cut with it. It’s not easy, it took me years. But I feel like I’ve made it. I was going to be a dancer, a vocation that violence castrated me. At 16, when I was ready to go to my dance classes, the phone rang and they told me that my dad had been killed. I stopped dancing unconsciously, years later I found out that it was because of that. Luckily the interpretation appeared and this profession that I love so much. I think that because of what I have suffered in life I can better understand issues that have to do with pain.
-He came to Spain in 2000, a fruitful and happy adventure.
-In this country I have developed as a woman and as an actress, I have been a mother and I have a Spanish daughter. I love Spain, honestly. I also feel very Colombian, I love and it hurts Colombia. And I have forgiven her. I have suffered a lot from being uprooted, especially the first few years, when you don’t feel like you’re from here or from there. It is not easy to get ahead in a country that is not yours, to earn a place.
-What relationship does it have with age?
-I am 45 years old, I feel very full. I like how old I am, I would not like to go back to 20 or 30. Age gives us women another weight, another understanding. It’s a shame that you enter your 40s and it seems that you start to disappear, when it is the moment in which we should be more present, when we are more prepared. All women are on a very interesting path of empowerment and losing the fear of saying what we think and doing what we want. I feel more and more free to say and do what I want, without guilt or fear.
-You always appear on the list of best dressed women, you are a glamor icon.
-It arises naturally, I don’t know if because I studied Fine Arts before doing theater, because of my perception of shapes, colors and textures. But I won’t give this topic another minute, I don’t have time. I am an actress who works a lot, now I am a producer. The cinema brought me closer to fashion and, without intending it, there began to be a good harmony. But I promise you that I don’t lose sleep, I try not to make it a demand and I take it as a game.
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