Notes On Big Bang
Directed by: Wilson Burbano| Ecuador | 84 min
-Selim Khan
“When the state imprisons a person by controlling their body, their time, and their identity, and if their imagination refuses to submit to that control, should we call it madness or freedom?”
I finally watched my friend Wilson Burbano del Hierro ’s film Big Bang. Seeing the title Big Bang, one might assume that the film is somehow about the birth of the universe. It is not. As the director himself has explained, the film is not about an external explosion, but about continuous implosions taking place within the character. The guards can control a prisoner’s external space and time, but they cannot completely control his inner space and inner time.
Big Bang can be read simultaneously as a prison film, a historical allegory, an experimental fantasy, or a metaphysical journey. But beneath all these layers lies a much more intimate and unsettling journey—the gradual disappearance of Ni Pío’s individuality. At first, we see the story of a condemned prisoner. But gradually, that story turns into a journey where the boundaries between ‘I’ and ‘the other’, present and past, reality and imagination, sanity and madness begin to collapse. And this tendency to break boundaries is probably what I appreciate most about the film. Ni Pío’s identity first appears before us as something imposed upon him by the state. He is a prisoner. There are accusations against him. His body is under state control, his time is under state control, and even his identity has been reduced to an accusation and a sentence.
The state has already decided who he is.
Ni Pío’s response does not show escape in the conventional sense. He does not break through the prison walls and run away. Instead, he begins to break through the boundaries of reality itself. The spiral he creates from the dust of the prison cell is one of the most important moments in this transformation. The spiral becomes, at once, an act of creation, resistance, and perhaps the beginning of madness. From the outside, Ni Pío’s behavior can easily appear irrational. A prisoner waiting for death is drawing a spiral on the ground and entering different historical and imagined worlds through it. It would be very easy to dismiss this as madness. But human beings have always searched for freedom. There is something within us that refuses to accept every boundary imposed upon us. The film brings that desire for freedom to the surface. The greatest paradox of Ni Pío is that when his physical freedom is almost completely destroyed, his individuality becomes stronger than ever. The prison wants to turn him not into a human being, but into a body, a case, a sentence, and eventually a waiting corpse. Yet inside that confined space, he begins to create an alternative universe of his own. His cell is no longer merely a prison. It becomes a laboratory of imagination.
Ni Pío’s resistance, therefore, is not primarily physical. It is existential. He refuses to accept that the reality given to him is the only possible reality. His rebellion is not simply against the prison, but against the state, against existing rules and laws, against the court, and against the reality defined by power. This is where Ni Pío can also be read through Michel Foucault’s idea of institutional power. A prison does not merely confine the body; it produces a particular kind of subject. Ni Pío begins to break that imposed subjectivity.
Interestingly, I myself spent 289 days in prison under the previous government and was subjected to three days of enforced disappearance and torture. Because of that, perhaps I had a slightly different point of entry into Ni Pío’s experience. When I was subjected to continuous torture for two days, Ritwik Ghatak appeared to me. Throughout my time in prison, I found certain similarities between my own journey and Ni Pío’s. At one point while watching the film, I felt—I was Ni Pío.
And this brings me to a question I would like to ask the director. In his search for individuality, Ni Pío gradually begins to lose his individuality. As he moves beyond the identity he once wanted to escape, he reaches a point where the very existence of a stable ‘I’ becomes uncertain. Is the discovery of this new ‘I’—or Ni Pío’s existential crisis, his eventual disappearance—being presented as a form of liberation? Or is it another kind of disappearance of the individual?
Perhaps one day we can sit down and talk about this at length, Wilson. One of the greatest strengths of Big Bang is that the film never clearly tells us whether Ni Pío’s journeys are real or imagined. Are they dreams? Memories? Hallucinations? Reincarnation? Historical imagination? Or does the distinction between these possibilities itself become meaningless? Burbano seems less interested in giving us an answer than in making us experience this uncertainty. And this is where the film’s experimental form and Ni Pío’s psychological journey become one. The film is not simply telling us that his idea of reality is falling apart. The form of the film seems to fall apart along with it. For him, genre can limit a filmmaker’s imagination. He does not want to make a cinema where every shot is rigidly fixed in advance by the script. He does not really care about genre. And that freedom is perhaps what I felt most strongly within the form of Big Bang. The film tends to break every set boundary. What I found particularly interesting is that most of the people in the film are not professional actors. I really enjoyed the process of breaking and rebuilding that Wilson goes through with these non-professional performers. Instead of forcing their presence into the conventional structure of acting, he seems to dissolve the distance between character, body, and environment. For me, Big Bang is a thoroughly political film.
Powerful institutions usually decide what is real, what is rational, what is acceptable—and even who is mad and who is sane. A prisoner who refuses to accept an institutionally defined reality can very easily be labelled irrational or mad. Ni Pío’s imagination is therefore dangerous to power. Because power can control his body. It can control his movement. It can control his time. But it cannot completely control his imagination. His body is imprisoned. But his imagination can cross centuries. In this sense, his madness is political. Ni Pío does not deliver a conventional political statement, and yet, in another sense, he does. He does not pronounce a manifesto. Instead, he rejects the institution’s monopoly over reality.
The film also breaks apart the conventional idea of freedom and leaves me with another question:
Is madness the last territory of human freedom? A territory where, ultimately, no one can exercise complete control. While watching the film, at one point I felt as though I was reading a novel by the Marquis de Sade.Not merely a reader—I felt like I was the protagonist of that novel.
Selim Khan is a Bangladeshi filmmaker, writer & film activist. He is the founder of Anti Social Productions and co-founder of the Abbas Kiarostami Cine Club. His practice moves between filmmaking, writing, and film activism, with a strong commitment to developing an independent and accessible film culture in Bangladesh.
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