Veladores

A family photo, the sound of the oncoming storm, the cat wandering the kitchen, a man alone in this space. Paz Encina’s early melancholic short is a conversation not shown on screen. Has it already occured or does it take place after this brief moment in time? Using only subtitles and visual language, SUPE QUE ESTABAS TRISTE creates an array if emotions without ever having to “show” anything.

Set in 1935, a couple of aged smallholders are waiting for their son, for rain, for better days.

Eami means ‘forest’ in Ayoreo. It also means ‘world’. The story happens in the Paraguayan Chaco, the territory with the highest deforestation rate in the world. 25,000 hectares of forest are being deforested a month in this territory which would mean an average of 841 hectares a day or 35 hectares per hour. The forest barely lives and this only due to a reserve that the Totobiegosode people achieved in a legal manner. They call Chaidi this place which means ancestral land or the place where we always lived and it is part of the "Ayoreo Totobiegosode Natural and Cultural Heritage". Before this, they had to live through the traumatic situation of leaving the territory behind and surviving a war. It is the story of the Ayoreo Totobiegosode people, told from the point of view of Asoja, a bird-god with the ability to bring an omniscient- temporal gaze, who becomes the narrator of this story developed in a crossing between documentary and fiction.

The culmination of Encina’s work with the so-called Archives of Terror—meticulous records kept by the government of dictator Alfredo Stroessner. Encina’s longstanding political and aesthetic research project focused on how a community can cope with such detailed accounts of human rights violations. Memory and history, the personal and the political interweave in this experimental documentary that explores the consequences of Stroessner’s decades-long state terror regime and how it continues to mark the Paraguayan people. Constructed from the testimonies, visual material, and memories of the children of Agustín Goiburú, an opposition leader who disappeared in 1979, the documentary is a provocative reflection on how film might respond to political circumstances amid a surfeit of images of terror.

"La felicidad is a short film about nostalgia and the memory of my late brother. Since then, I only think of him and try to recreate some kind of image that can still unite us, that can still make me feel, some notion of happiness, some kind of resemblance, that gives me back his image and my own, together, beautful, eternal". (Paz Encina)

Weaving together original audio and archival materials from the 35-year period in which Paraguay was ruled by military dictator Alfredo Stroessner, this film reconstructs the reflections of a man who has been sentenced to house arrest.

An homage to master Eduardo Coutinho, a Brazilian documentary filmmaker who recorded several interviews in the famous Master Building 20 years ago. Paz Encina searches for traces of Coutinho's still strong presence in the setting/object of his feature film, sewing an affectionate letter from the encounter with this space — and its current residents — and dialoguing with the voids, ghosts and memories of a film and a place.

An encounter from night till morning.