Bajo las banderas, el sol tells the history of Alfredo Stroessner’s dictatorship between 1954 and 1989, and ends by evoking the continuity of the regime in today’s Paraguay. How did this project come about? What is at stake in this memory exercise for you today?
This project was born out of curiosity, from a simple question I asked myself many years ago:
What had been filmed about Paraguay? Where were all the images of my country?
That question stayed with me around 2017, while I was studying Latin American Film History as part of the Image and Sound Design degree at the University of Buenos Aires. I wanted to understand political history, the history of images, the history of cinematic representation. And so began an obsession that led me, over the years, to catalogue, watch, analyse, and compare images of power images of evil. Not images of resistance.
More than an act of memory, this project is a confrontation, a tension against the official gaze, both national and international, toward one of the longest dictatorships in the world.
With the help of my friends and advisors, we managed to shape this work for the present.
Why does it still feel so present? As simple as this: the same party is still in power.
In the first few minutes, a title card indicates that the film has been made from the few existing archives on the dictatorship worldwide, most of those from Paraguay not having been preserved. However, some of the propaganda archives do come from Paraguay. How did you get access to them? As for the rest, how did you go about researching all over the world? How much archive did you have?
A few years ago, I got in touch with Ray Armele, former director of Asunción Audiovisual, a preservation space in Asunción that safeguarded some VHS tapes and newsreels many of them literally found in the trash. The work Ray has been doing for years, especially through Facebook, is invaluable. Over time, he began receiving film reels he couldn’t digitize, since Paraguay has no functioning film lab. Moreover, Asunción Audiovisual, like many other institutions, suffers from chronic underfunding and neglect by the disastrous cultural administration of Asunción’s municipal government.
The production of this film allowed us to digitize part of those archives. We donated the virtual copies back to Asunción Audiovisual to ensure they remain available there.
The arrival of these materials was essential in helping us understand a narrative we had been overlooking: the national narrative, the official discourse. One of the most important rescues was a one-hour newsreel on 16mm film, partially with synchronous sound, estimated to have been shot in 1966 or 1967. With the help of historians Ana Barreto Valinotti and Milda Rivarola, I was able to understand the archives I was uncovering. And with artists Alfredo Quiroz and Bernardo Puente, I was able to ask the right questions of the materials we found.
On the other hand, thanks to the guidance of cultural manager Ana Martini, I was introduced to the researcher Manuel Cuenta, who has worked for years on audiovisual preservation. Back in 2012, with support from the European Union and RECAM, he managed to recover several reels. Thanks to these efforts, we now have approximately five hours of newsreels filmed in Paraguay during the dictatorship, between 1954 and 1980. All of this material was shot on film. Five hours to represent 26 years of history, it’s little, and yet it’s a lot, considering where we started.
The arrival of U-Matic, Betacam, and VHS could have meant better preservation. But that wasn’t the case. We also found newsreels in those formats abandoned in the trash.
The international research began with archives in Argentina. Argentina is a key country for understanding Paraguayan cinema: the first Paraguayan films were co-productions with Argentina, a country with which we share a complex relationship of brotherhood and conflict, complicity and rivalry. The investigation continued in Brazil, a key ally of the Paraguayan dictatorship, and then came the biggest surprises: the archives of the Global North, the U.S. and Europe. Archives that, while denouncing the dictatorship, also revealed their own geopolitical contradictions supporting, even passively or economically, Latin American authoritarian regimes.
Paradoxically, the archives located outside Paraguay were far more accessible, better preserved, and easier to view although gaining access still took years. Today, we have over 100 hours of catalogued footage from international sources.
What did I find? I’m sure there’s more material still hidden in Paraguay. But I didn’t set out to create a national film archive. I wanted to make a film.
One hundred hours to represent 35 years. It might seem like very little, or it might seem like a lot. It depends on the cultural lens through which you look.
What was the writing process like in relation to these archives? What were the different stages?
This was a chaotic film to make. Chaotic in its process, its subject, and its emotional weight.
You can imagine what it means to spend over four years staring at the face of a dictator and all his henchmen. Over and over again. Pausing, rewinding, examining every detail. The gestures, the words, the ceremonies of power. The images of fear.
There was something in those images that made me understand something about myself, about my country where I come from and how I was shaped even if I couldn’t fully feel it or explain it.
The topic was already chaos in itself, in the middle of it all, I wanted to make the most difficult film in the world: to tell the story of a country. What madness. What an obsession.
It all began with a catalogue: gathering everything available online about Paraguay. Then, everything about the dictatorship. We started combing through the deepest of the internet, discovering lost fragments uploaded by anonymous users, with no clear sources. It took us years to trace some of those files, and others we never managed to track down. Some we couldn’t use because they weren’t digitized. Others were restricted by local businessmen. And many had prohibitively high international licensing fees.
Still, we managed to build an exhaustive catalogue that took us about a year and a half to complete. We categorized the material: presidents, nature, countryside/city, children, women… We created every possible tag to build a visual narrative.
From the more than 100 hours of footage, we printed all the voice-over transcripts and assembled a kind of “bible” of over 600 pages, which stayed with us throughout the entire process. There was a lot of paper, a lot of printing and a lot of work done on Miro, which became an indispensable companion.
Every time we thought we had seen it all, something new would surface. Something that shifted our narrative arc. Or something that simply wasn’t there that had never been filmed and whose absence forced us to find another way to tell the story.
Eventually, after reviewing all the material, it was time to build the narrative. With Sofía Monardo, over “mates and medialunas”, we began writing the chronological script that can be seen on screen today. That script was developed in parallel with Julián Galay and Manuel Embalse, who constructed the body of the edit.
Julián’s sound design and the music by Andrés Montero Bustamante wove together the final shape of the film, a film that, much like the country it seeks to portray, was built through persistence, chaos, and memory.
The editing follows a chronological logic, from the beginning to the end of the regime, emphasizing key moments, elements and characters that underline the horror of the dictatorship. There are also a number of effects—slow motion, acceleration and rewind effects. How did you go about editing the film with Manuel Embalse? Could you elaborate on these choices?
We chose to tell the story chronologically because this is a little-known dictatorship that required contextual guidance, both locally and internationally. We wanted to strip these official materials of their authority. To wring them out like a soaked rag, to flip them, to play with them. To manipulate them, but also to intervene symbolically.
The reversed footage is not just a visual gimmick or an aesthetic whim. It responds to something deeper: it reflects the backwardness the dictatorship imposed on the country.
We believe narrative and formal tools exist to be used critically to create distance, to bring in irony, to challenge the images. We wanted to break through them. To pause. To move closer. To push beyond the official narrative. To touch the sun in the middle of so many flags. To see and feel the humanity hidden beneath those rigid gestures, those institutional frames, those choreographies of power.
The film alternates between the Paraguayan point of view and that of foreign countries, which is ambiguous. On the one hand, the cult of Stroessner, on the other, the interplay of alliances and the denunciation of oppression. How did you achieve this balance?
The images we worked with are not only official archives from Paraguay, but also from other countries. They are what power wanted and still wants to show, but not all powers carry the same weight. Some countries have greater symbolic and media influence than others, and that’s where a fundamental contradiction emerges.
Deconstructing the imagery of power was one of our main goals. The local images built an imposing, almost religious cult, consumed and reproduced for more than 35 years. And yet, while some international media were denouncing Paraguay’s dictatorship, others were simultaneously helping to sustain it, whether directly or indirectly.
For me, it was always a push-and-pull game, a tension in the narrative: first, to construct the idolization. To amplify it. To take it to its extreme.
And then to strip it down. To dismantle it. To expose what these images were really made of.
Because what they tried to show us was a country that never existed: the country of peace and order under Stroessner.
You chose to make a film with no commentary, either spoken or written. Why did you do this? Was this a decision you made from the outset of the project?
The first decision I made when starting this project was clear: I told Manuel and Sofía that I didn’t want a voice over, I didn’t want a didactic voice, I didn’t want the film to feel totalitarian in its way of knowing. It’s a big puzzle, a series of gestures from the apparatus of power, placed under tension, stripped of their original form, laid bare in their rawness.
I wanted the images and words to confront themselves, to finally reveal how dangerous they can be.
My task or better said, my game was always this: to let the archives speak.
To make them speak to each other, to contradict, negate, and respond to one another. And in that dialogue, perhaps we might see something we had never seen before.
The soundtrack is extremely rich, balancing the inner sound of the archives with an experimental approach. In which directions was it composed with Julián Galay?
Julián Galay was with us from the very beginning. It’s also important to note that Manuel Embalse is a sound designer and I… I was a student of them both.
From day one, we composed together. We fed off each other in a process of constant listening. All I can say about myself is that I’m an eclectic person, and the sound team fully embraced my desire to make everything resonate.
Sound was our brush. Our commentary. Our voice.
As we investigated the images, formats, and textures, we also dove into a deep exploration of the sonic character of the decades: What did the 1950s sound like? What do the 1980s sound like? What happens if we invert those sonic palettes? What does a polka glorifying a dictator sound like? And how do we deconstruct it until it becomes eternal, distorted, ghostly?
Sound allowed us to find the ghosts in this film. It forced us to activate the presence of those no longer here. The media we encountered during the making of this film didn’t give us answers, they opened up possibilities.
Julián is a sound artist who accompanied this entire process with rare excellence and sensitivity. His work gave the film a force and a physicality rooted in his deep commitment: understanding that our most powerful tool wasn’t the image, but the expansion of sound.
It’s a sound that doesn’t just illustrate it brings things to life. It draws your attention, sets the rhythm, and gives new meaning to forgotten images. Julián composed with a sense of absence, and in the middle of an archive full of tension, his sound gave the film exactly what it needed: a pulse that lets history be heard again, even if the echo it leaves behind is something completely different.
Interview by Louise Martin Papasian
