Un paraíso socialista

The film depicts an eccentric Argentine family consisting of an elderly woman, her son, and the maid. Their relationships with each other and the outside world are closely linked to the dictatorship that grips the country they live in.

Bruno is 33 years old, he is unemployed by choice and has entered a kind of paralysis that blocks everything: lost and with no certain destination, he wanders immersed in an indefinite void, a situation in which his enthusiasm for things has also fallen. and the people. Isabel's ghostly appearances in his life mark the three unique nights in which the film takes place.

Marcelo decides to abandon his life as a city publicist, sells his properties, and builds a ranch on the island. He sails to Don Armando's store for supplies. Victoria works there, with whom he has a romantic relationship and ends up living with him. One night, two men try to rob them; Victoria is shot and killed, and he kills her attackers. The ranch burns down. Marcelo abandons his lost paradise by rowing downriver.

Perhaps now overshadowed by the figures of the excluded or the immigrant, workers have been portrayed in cinema mostly in the context of conflicts or as castaways of progress and globalization. But beyond these demands, who are these workers today? What has become of their lives? How have their dreams and visions been transformed?

Throughout his childhood, the filmmaker Cristian Pauls vacationed in Fortín Tiburcio. Half a century later, he returns to the small town. Against all odds, his journey –and that of the film– moves away from a nostalgic reconstruction to become an update of a distant but still tangible past.

The film retraces the journey of Gustav Emil Haeger's Swedish expedition (1920). Using the route defined by "Following the Indian Trails of the Pilcomayo River," the film made by the Swedish contingent in Formosa at the time, the film contrasts that past with the present-day journey.