Cinema
El pueblo
Synopsis
A day in the life of a town in the interior of Paraguay, filmed mainly in Tobatí, a former Guaraní Indian village renowned for its folk art: the work of peasant hands, the rites of faith, the legends told at the counter of the almacén, taciturn and silent men. In black and white and in colour, with images and sounds worked experimentally, the film turns its back on the idealised and nationalist image of the country promoted by the Stroessner regime.
Context
The medium-length film was shot in twenty days in mid-1968, in Tobatí, Villeta and Capiatá, edited in Argentina and presented on 5 December 1969 at the Paraguayan-American Cultural Centre in Asunción; exiles such as Augusto Roa Bastos, Elvio Romero and José Asunción Flores had lent a hand. It left the billing within the first week under pressure from the dictatorship, the prints were hidden and the group dispersed. Shown in Paris in 1970 and in Milan in 1971, it returned to Paraguay only after 1989 and was long thought lost.
Who it is for
Forty-two minutes, shot in sixteen millimetre. It is better to know that the film was made in a country where almost no cinema was being shot, and under a censorship that made it disappear.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as one of the major milestones of Paraguayan cinema; in 1972, a Peruvian critic greeted it with an article titled “Paraguayan cinema exists!”.
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