Giant statue ParaguayDictator, General Alfredo StrusnerIt is used to control the capital of Association. Now, all that remains on the site is his solid shoes. The huge Strossner was cut off in the ankles after it was removed in 1989 after nearly 35 years of military rule.
“It’s crazy. The director’s comments” still there ” Juanjo Pereira. “He is still there and it will be there for many years.”
People, who celebrate Strossner, cut off his head, trunk and statue legs. However, the base remains – the foundation. Perhaps this symbolism is the most important to understand it from the new documentary of Pereira Under flags, the sunWhich was played in Thesaloniki International Documentary Festival In Greece on Monday night. She won the FIPRESCI CRITICS Award in the Panorama section Berlin Film Festival Last month, the documentary was shown for the first time.
“It was the last [right-wing] The director indicated during a question and answer after the examination.
Paraguay military ruler, General Alfredo Strokener, around 1975
FPG/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Strossner seized power in 1954, promised “peace, progress and brotherhood”, but it offers repression under the guise of evil hostility. During his reign, nearly 20,000 political exhibitions were exposed, and hundreds were “disappeared.” A system like this does not call for scrutiny, and limits the existing shots. But Pereira’s research is about 120 hours of footage around the world, which has become the basis for his movie.
The streets of news, advertising films, and some of the materials that French journalists called “the disclosure of hidden force mechanisms behind the rule of Strossner”, like Thesaloniki Festival He describes it. There are also footage of the head of Strossner who visits Lindon Johnson in Washington in the 1960s, where he was warmly received as a useful American ally in the Cold War.
Human remains, which are believed to be buried in the 1970s during the dictatorship of Alfredo Strweenner, discovered on the outskirts of Association, Paraguay on March 19, 2013
Norberto Duarte/AFP via Getty Images
The cameras did not document the torture of trade unionists and others in Paraguay. However, useful, the dictatorship retained written records of its activities that were discovered in 1992. It became the “archives of terrorism”, and it became known, an important source of Pereira.
“The terrorist archives are one of the most important archives in Latin America,” Pereira said. “It’s free to go [and see]And it is in the Ministry of Justice. “
General Alfredo Strweenner (left) Yahya with Alejandro Agostin Lanos Jelly, President of Argentina, in 1972
FPG/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Between documents and loved pictures, most of them in black and white, the film shows how Strossner dominated all aspects of Paraguay’s life, making many ordinary people unable to think of themselves. He devised the personality of a strong man and surrounded himself with a severe court (may jump as similar aspects of Trump 2.0 to mind, but this is outside the scope of this documentary).
Once he reached the mid -seventies of the last century, Strossner seemed to lose a step and the Colorado party, which was tightly controlled by another military man, Andres Rodriguez, who was previously close to Strossner.
“In a way, the end of the dictatorship was not a revolutionary moment. It was a change in the matter,” noted. “The Colorado party needs to change its image … not the people who take power.”
LR James Costa Product, Supervisor, and Director Juanjo Pereira speaks in a question and an answer after a show “Under the Flags, the Sun” in Thissaloniki, Greece
Matthew Curry
Pereira described himself as “a child of democracy. She was born after the coup [of 1989]But presenting a question from the audience, asked whether the form of the Paraguay government today really represents people.
“I don’t know if we live in democracy in Paraguay,” he said. “The last elections [the Colorado Party] 80 percent won [of the vote] The government is full of Colorado people. We have no opposition in Paraguay. Is it democracy? I don’t know, maybe it is up to us to understand that. Yes, there are no longer hidden people, but we have no [the ability] To choose [leaders]. It is complicated to say that this is democracy. Perhaps we need to find a new way to say what is the world in which we live now. “
Pereira suggested that Strossner has been cleaned from his country’s history. At school we did not study this period of the country. So I finished school at eighteen and I did not even know who this man was. I started searching for the history of cinema in Paraguay, and then found more about the dictatorship and in a way, she studied dictatorship through archives. “
a description Under flags, the sun“The film opens questions, suggests questions. This is my main goal,” said Pereira.
He added: “We know a little about this period. For me, it seems as if we only know shrapnel and the film revolves around shrapnel … I take all these fragments and guide this feeling of memory.”
