Oscars: Peru Selects Paolo Tizón’s Award-Winning Documentary NIGHT HAS COME

Peru has selected Paolo Tizón’s acclaimed debut feature Night Has Come / Vino la noche as its official submission for Best International Feature Film at the 99th Academy Awards. The documentary was chosen by an independent committee of Peruvian film professionals in a selection process coordinated by the country’s Ministry of Culture. The film will also represent Peru in the Best Ibero-American Film category at the 2027 Goya Awards.

Tizón’s striking observational documentary follows a group of young men who voluntarily enlist in one of the Peruvian Armed Forces’ most demanding training programs, hoping to transform themselves into elite soldiers. As they prepare for eventual deployment to the VRAEM—a region marked by coca cultivation, drug trafficking, and armed conflict—the film immerses viewers in the hermetic world of military training, where extreme physical discipline and brutality coexist with unexpected moments of vulnerability, compassion, and care.

Without relying on narration or conventional exposition, Night Has Come offers an intimate portrait of young men being transformed into soldiers while exploring masculinity, violence, camaraderie, and the fragile boundary between innocence and experience.

The film had its world premiere in the Proxima Competition at the 2024 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, where it won both the Special Jury Prize and the FIPRESCI Award. It subsequently screened at festivals including Doclisboa, Morelia, Cairo, Havana, Málaga, Cinélatino Toulouse, and the Lima Film Festival, among others. Tizón received the Silver Biznaga for Best Director in the documentary competition at the 2025 Málaga Film Festival.

Written, photographed, and co-edited by Tizón, Night Has Come made its U.S. premiere at MoMA’s Doc Fortnight in New York, where the Museum of Modern Art described the film as “a powerful meditation on innocence and experience, and fragility and brutality.”

Peru has been submitting films to the Academy Awards since 1967. The country has received one nomination in the category: Claudia Llosa’s The Milk of Sorrow / La teta asustada, which was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 82nd Academy Awards in 2010.

Watch the Trailer for Gael García Bernal’s HOMBRE AL AGUA, Set to Premiere at Venice and Toronto

The first trailer has been released for Hombre al agua, the third feature directed by Mexican actor and filmmaker Gael García Bernal, who also stars, co-writes, and produces. The film will have its world premiere in the Venice Spotlight section of the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, followed by its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF).

The trailer also reveals a previously unannounced addition to the cast: Puerto Rican superstar Ricky Martin, who appears in the film and serves as an executive producer. Martin plays Roby, an actor hired to portray García Bernal’s character, Camilo, in a biographical film within the film. The role marks Martin’s return to acting entirely in Spanish after more than two decades.

Co-written by García Bernal and acclaimed Argentine playwright and filmmaker Mariano Pensotti, Hombre al Agua follows Camilo, a Cuban lifeguard who saves Mexican businessman Abel from drowning. Grateful for the rescue, Abel brings Camilo to Mexico, where he marries Abel’s daughter, Juana, and starts a family. But Camilo soon discovers that his seemingly fortunate new life is part of Abel’s elaborate scheme of manipulation and control.

Described as a comedy-drama with surreal undertones, the film uses Camilo’s increasingly precarious circumstances to explore questions of power, masculinity, intimate relationships, and contemporary Latin America. In his director’s statement, García Bernal describes Hombre al Agua as an “open love letter” to the seas he has navigated throughout his life and a fable through which he wanted to examine “the crisis of masculinity” and “the political soul of Latin America.”

The international cast also includes Esmeralda Pimentel, Débora Nascimento, Natalia Oreiro, Anna Díaz, Ezequiel Díaz, Manuel García Rulfo, and Jorge Salinas. The 116-minute film is a production of La Corriente del Golfo, Cárcava Cine, and Redrum, with García Bernal, Fernanda de la Peza, and Stacy Perskie credited as producers.

Hombre al agua marks García Bernal’s return to feature directing following Déficit (2007) and Chicuarotes (2019), both of which were presented at the Cannes Film Festival. The new film will have its official Venice premiere on September 6 before heading to Toronto.

Watch the trailer below: