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.
