Capital Conversations: Gabriel Azorín's “Last Night I Conquered the City of Thebes”

By Maurice Burbridge | September 29, 2025 

Photo Credit: Amador Lorenzo

Gabriel Azorín’s debut feature film, “Last Night I Conquered the City of Thebes,” follows Antonio & Jota, two Portuguese boys returning from the military front with their friends, for a night of relaxation in the Roman thermal baths, where they feel compelled to be honest and intimate in ways that hadn’t been before, like the original Roman soldiers who found the baths. 

“Last Night I Conquered the City of Thebes” was selected for the New York Film Festival. Through a press screening, we got the chance to speak with Azorín, and hear more about the process of making the film, the themes, and his inspirations. 

When he first visited the thermal baths, Azorín assumed it would be an easy place to film, but found a lot of challenges after shooting began in winter.

“It's very cold outside, but very hot in the water, and for the actors it's kind of challenging. Also, the water of the reservoir covers the thermal bath for half the year. When we first shot in 2023, there was a big storm that covered all the thermal baths in one night so we had to stop the shooting, and continue the next year, because the thermal baths disappeared for like 6 months.”

He said of the Roman thermal baths, “it’s a very magical place, and if you want its permission, you have to win it.”

In retrospect, Azorín says the one thing he wishes he could change, in a perfect world, was the length of filming. Regular shooting was only five weeks, which required detailed planning of the approximately 30 shots.

“And I'm not so interested in being accurate because I like when you try to do something and reality changes, and that relationship between your ideas, the world of ideas, and the clash with reality,” said Azorín.

He expanded, “I wanted something more cinematographical in the way they act, in the way they stay, because my aim is to create a limbo, where people from different times are living together. And I wanted to create that mood, that special mood, that also the hot water, the night, the steam, gives to your body when you are there.”

Much of the film’s conversations and themes are inspired by Azorín’s own philosophical questioning.

“I think everything that is in the screen, everything that is said by the young boys, their way of thinking what to do with the little time they’re going to have, what the Roman soldiers say to each other about the feeling of losing people you love the most.. everything is about the way I understand life and the questions I ask myself- ‘How do we want to live?, What do we want to do with our short life?’”

The “Epic of Gilgamesh,” which was written over three centuries ago, not only influenced Azorín as a work about intimate male vulnerability and friendship, but also as an example of art’s capability to speak to future generations.

“I think I wrote this story because I didn’t dare to say things, I care a lot and I don’t dare to say that to my friends. For me, fiction was the solution to talk about all these things that in my real life I don’t dare to say to my male friends. This conversation involves for me people that are living now but also people that are dead and people that will exist in the future. It’s important for me that art, that cinema, speaks in a way to human people not only in your time.”

Azorín worked with some of his friends in the making of the film, and found that it was successful in saying things he struggled to say verbally.

“This film is magical also, because with this sequence in the middle of the film, the long conversation between these young Portuguese boys, Antonio and Jota, it’s a conversation that a lot of people, friends, family– when they watch that conversation, they feel I’m talking to them. So I think it’s a very good thing that it’s kind of polysemic and different people feel it’s about them. At the beginning I had one friend in my mind but little by little, with the writing and shooting and all these sequences, I think it speaks to very different people, and I’m happy about that.”

The film’s title card closes with a drone scene, which follows the protagonists as they walk to the ruins of a Roman camp, and moves further and further to show the whole camp. It’s the only drone shot in the film. Azorín usually dislikes drone shots in film, but thought it was necessary here. 

“If you shoot the camp from the ground, you see nothing, because the walls are only like 30 centimeters from the ground, and I was asking myself ‘What is the best way?’ If you think about Roman architecture, it’s about repetition and singularity, and I also was very interested in video games, walking and open world video games. I think it’s very interesting, this conversation between video games and cinema, but it’s not so common. I like to play video games where I can walk and walk and walk, and the world never ends. And with all these questions, I thought the best way to shoot this camp was from above, and the further away the better.”

He found the topside view of the camp resembled a map of a video game level, like in Legend of Zelda. Red Dead Redemption 2 was another influence on him. “I love to get the horse, only walking [and] looking at the sunset, I don’t need missions, just walking with the horse. I like walking [and open world] video games a lot, and I play with my sister a lot.”

Another memorable shot in the film is when the young boys are looking at the stars, and it cuts to a 3D model of labelled satellites, constellations, and stars. Azorín said, “It's all about creating the possibility of different worlds, different universes, like parallel realities. It’s something for me, in cinema, the possibility to create a new universe. To have cinema as a machine of fascination that drives you into the unknown, going back in time and playing with all these devices.”

The real thermal baths can reach a point of total darkness, as shown in the film, in another very beautiful and memorable sequence.

“For me it was important that Antonio and Jota enter in the darkness. In the quiet of the warm water. The steam. So they can walk through a new dimension, a limbo, so they can say things in another way that's impossible for them to say,” he said. 

When it comes to future films being inspired by other impactful experiences of his, Azorín provided insight into his filmmaking philosophy. 

“For me to make films is kind of like love. You don’t choose to fall in love, you fall. With “Last Night I Conquered the City of Thebes,” [and] the encounter with this thermal bath I didn’t want to make a film, I wanted to make this film. So in the way I choose to make films, I need to fall in love. I cannot decide that, it’s only about waiting and maybe in the future I will fall in love again and make a new film, but I’m not thinking about that at the moment, I’m just waiting for the signals.”