Last Night I Conquered the City of Thebes

What connects a video game and an archaeological site? The fact that both are indirect ways of imagining the past and allowing it to merge with the lived imagination of the present. In Gabriel Azorín’s Last Night I Conquered the City of Thebes (Anoche conquisté Tebas), the ruins of a Roman campsite and the nearby thermal spa in Bande, Galicia, constitute the cosmic knot from which the Spanish filmmaker weaves a transtemporal tale that juxtaposes and blurs the boundaries between a group of Portuguese friends and a group of Roman soldiers. Under the same stars and in the same thermal baths, the parallel stories of two friendships unfold, raising questions about new beginnings and conformism. Yet this is only the final thread in a film that inverts the conventional conflict–resolution dialectic of cinema, placing an unresolved openness at the end of its arc.

Rather than being preoccupied with dramaturgy, Last Night I Conquered the City of Thebes meditates on its own filmic material, first and foremost the blackness of the screen. The long nocturnal scenes constitute an iconoclastic gesture that preludes the emergence of painterly bodies and redirects our attention towards sounds and voices, including song. Between Portuguese, Spanish, Galician, and spoken Latin, these voices embody a universality that transcends historical distance. Instead, it is care and humanism that permeate the film, together with a masculine intimacy and gentleness seemingly infused with a utopian flair.