Behind the flags, the sun, by Juanjo Pereira, is a film montage. A film that compiles rare archives from a small country largely ignored. A highly political film that pulls from oblivion images of a fierce dictatorship; mostly controlled images that cinema has the role of scratching, subverting, and putting into context to reveal what lies behind them. It’s a cliché to say that a film is an act of memory. In this case, the process is literal and spectacular. The director and his editor worked on images that had never been exhumed; images that slept with researchers, in offices, sometimes damaged. One hundred and twenty hours in total to tell the story of 20th-century Paraguay. One hundred and twenty hours to try to fill a collective and personal void. According to his own words, Juanjo Pereira – at the end of the dictatorship – had never heard the name of the dictator during his entire education in Paraguay and had never seen any images of that period before starting his research.
In 1954, a certain Alfredo Stroessner took power with his party: the Colorado Party. The constitution then stipulated that he would lead Paraguay for four years. The years went by, elections followed, the constitution was rearranged, and, indefinitely, Stroessner was re-elected. Until the beginning of 1989, one of his loyal lieutenants overthrew him, officially abolishing the dictatorship. During these thirty-five years of reign, Stroessner systematically eliminated his opponents by perhaps turning 10% of the Paraguayan population into informants, having thousands of people arrested, tortured, and disappeared on charges of communism or terrorism. He transformed the rural economy of the country into a forced extractivist economy, displacing thousands of already poor peasants. He ostracized indigenous peoples, and also served as a notorious shelter for former Nazis, including Mengele, who lived for a time in a military zone directly protected by Stroessner.
A film that organizes its own history of Paraguay
All this violence, obviously the film can hardly show it because, by definition, it was hidden and censored by the regime. So other avenues must be found. There are first documents produced elsewhere on Paraguay, notably by French journalists who, on the ground since the sixties, came to interview peasants trying to organize cooperatives, or who spoke with opponents who sought refuge in Europe – such as the brother of a prominent resistance figure, arrested and tortured in the women’s prison of Asuncion.
These images are rare, alternating with the majority of propaganda images from the regime. One sees Stroessner at all ages, with his mustache and tall stature, inaugurating schools and mechanically answering interviews. Most importantly, in counter-shot, there are crowds, among which the film isolates a weary woman’s face, or a child who appears to be yielding. In the subjects on the glory of economic growth and modernity of Paraguay, the filmmaker zooms in, cuts and pastes, launches the reel backwards, loops the violent image of bombs exploding a dam, juxtaposes it with that of lost fauna, and a peasant transporting his wooden house on his truck.
Thus, the film organizes its own history of Paraguay, bringing together the abuses and violence, those against men and those against the living. It extracts from this fine material some quite striking images that leave a lasting impression, especially this filmed sequence in a central police station the day after the 1989 coup: in a crowded corridor of journalists, individuals seeking information on their disappeared loved ones, a rusty padlock is cut with pliers. In a small room, everyone, in a truly strange mix of calm and chaos, sifts through registers eaten away by humidity, retrieves banned magazines, a Lenin in Spanish, the last photo of a young man accused of treason.
