By Eva Karene Romero*
If you do a search for scholarly articles on Paraguayan film, you currently get two results. In 2003 the French film journal Cinemas d’Amerique latine printed an interview with Paraguayan director Hugo Gamarra Etchverry titled “¿Existe el cine paraguayo?” (“Does Paraguayan Film Exist?”). In 2006, the same journal printed a follow-up interview with Gamarra titled “A la espera del cine paraguayo” (“Waiting for Paraguayan Film”).Well, the wait for Paraguayan film is over.
Dictatorship in Paraguay concluded with the coup de’état of 1989, however, the process of “apertura social” (social change) was slow to take hold, possibly due to the fact that every president elected after the coup had close ties to the Strossner dictatorship until Nicanor Duarte’s election in 2003.
Unfortunately, most Paraguayans concur that his presidency was a huge disappointment: more of the same cronyism and corruption of the past (1). When left-leaning Fernando Lugo was elected in 2008, the mood was optimistic again: for the first time since 1948 a non-member of the Colorado party had risen to power. (Don’t ask me about how that optimism is doing today.)
The rise of Paraguayan film production parallels this political movement away from the old regime. Paraguayan film production has been fertile enough to sustain a national film blog since 2008: elpororo.com (pororó is Paraguayan for popcorn).
In 2006 the feature-length fiction Hamaca Paraguaya directed by Paz Encina was screened at the Cannes film festival, winning the FIPRESCI Prize. Ramiro Gómez’s ground-breaking documentary, Frankfurt, was released in 2008 screening at various international film festivals. Now, in 2010, the creative documentary Cuchillo de Palo directed by Renate Costa competed at Berlinale.
This time line is remarkable in that it signals a sudden international visibility of Paraguayan film that has never existed before. I mean this literally. Cine-clubs established during the sixties and seventies were squelched in the late 70s and 80s as “subversive” under the Strossner dictatorship. In fact, the only completely Paraguayan large-scale production to come out of the period was Cerro Corá (1977); a film financed by the state and widely regarded as political propaganda created to extend a fascist version of Paraguay’s history as promoted by the Strossner Regime.
Paraguayan film has not only arrived, but it has arrived in time with multiple local and global points of transition: transition from dictatorship to democracy; transition from literature to film as the referent for thought defining the nation in Latin America; and transition to global neoliberal order. Interesting food for thought along with that popcorn, or should I say pororó.
This time line is remarkable in that it signals a sudden international visibility of Paraguayan film that has never existed before. I mean this literally. Cine-clubs established during the sixties and seventies were squelched in the late 70s and 80s as “subversive” under the Strossner dictatorship. In fact, the only completely Paraguayan large-scale production to come out of the period was Cerro Corá (1977); a film financed by the state and widely regarded as political propaganda created to extend a fascist version of Paraguay’s history as promoted by the Strossner Regime.
Paraguayan film has not only arrived, but it has arrived in time with multiple local and global points of transition: transition from dictatorship to democracy; transition from literature to film as the referent for thought defining the nation in Latin America; and transition to global neoliberal order. Interesting food for thought along with that popcorn, or should I say pororó.
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*Eva Karene Romero is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Arizona, Tucson. She also writes for the Tucson blog TucsonQuerido.com.
[1] Paraguay was ranked the most corrupt country in South America, the second in the Americas after Haiti, and the fourth-most corrupt country in the world in 2003 by Berlin-based international anti-corruption watchdog, Transparency International.
