Andy Horbal
Pereira, J. (Director). Urízar, I., et al. (Executive Producers). (2025). Under the Flags, the Sun. Icarus Films. 92 mins. Although it consists almost entirely of footage about General Alfredo Stroessner’s dictatorial rule over Paraguay discovered through “an intensive search into film archives around the world,” Under the Flags, the Sun is not a dispassionate review of the public record like last year’s Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989. It is, rather, an angry walking tour through its ruins. After all, as the same title card that the quote above comes from also says, “the majority of the films and videos recorded during those 34 years have not been preserved or have disappeared.” The movie begins with excerpts from a series of educational films about Paraguay that describe it as small, landlocked and relatively unknown to the rest of the world, but quickly shifts to newsreel reports specifically about the military uprising that brought Stroessner to power. From here it proceeds in mostly chronological order through some of the major events that defined his regime, including a visit to the LBJ White House that saw him as a valuable Cold War ally, construction of the Itaipu Dam on Paraguay’s border with Brazil, an international tour of Asia and Europe in the early 1970s that was protested by groups like Amnesty International, and global controversy over Paraguay’s harboring of Nazi war criminal (and Stroessner’s personal physician) Josef Mengele, before ending with the coup led by his son-in-law that deposed him and his death in exile in 2006. The archival source material is manipulated throughout by being slowed down, paused, and run in reverse for effect, such as footage depicting the festivities that accompanied Stroessner’s inauguration, which as director Juanjo Pereira explained in an interview with Rachel Pronger from Documentary Magazine was intended “to reflect how when Stroessner comes to power, there’s this regression.” Sound effects such as loudly buzzing flies are added at other points for symbolic reasons and to heighten the emotional intensity of the moments they accompany. Editing also draws attention to the regime’s hypocrisy by juxtaposing pro-Stroessner folk music and propaganda with contradictory evidence from the archive, such as by pairing audio from a report on the Itaipu Dam that says “gone are the times when similar works were carried out by men crowded into uncomfortable barracks and sheds” with the image of countless workers pouring out of a makeshift sheet-metal building as though from a clown car. Under the Flags, the Sun concludes with its first and only use of original material. Archival material documenting a giant monument to Stroessner being removed and unceremoniously deposited into “a damp place, among scrap metal, in the municipal workshops of Asunción” is followed by two shots of the giant bronze feet that remained behind, which Pereira described in an interview with Matilda Hague from Filmmaker Magazine as “the symbol we needed, the one that tells you that nothing has changed,” a message reinforced by end titles noting that Stroessner’s Colorado Party is still in power as of 2025. Be that as it may, the film’s very existence and the fact that sculptor Carlos Colombino incorporated much of the rest of the Stroessner statue into a new work called "Burial of (another) Monument" on the Plaza de los Desaparecidos in Paraguay’s capital are powerful implicit arguments that even if work remains to be done, progress has been made. This makes it a versatile tool for instructors, and any library collection that includes the many movies which have already been made about the South American dictatorships in Paraguay’s neighboring countries of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile would be enhanced by its addition. Awards won include: FIPRESCI Prize, Berlin International Film Festival Best Film, International Competition, Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema Best Film in Zabaltegi-Tabakalera Competition, San Sebastián International Film Festival