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“The Film is Not a Resistance Film”: Juanjo Pereira on Berlinale 2025 Premiere Under the Flags, the Sun
Under the Flags, the Sun A row of men sit proudly on horses as a white flag drifts languidly in the wind. The beating sun lights the crowd, who applaud dictator Alfredo Stroessner’s ascent to power in 1954, and with it, the promise of “peace, progress and fraternity.” Time slows down as an ominous atmosphere envelopes this scene, foreshadowing what the future holds for Paraguay. Juanjo Pereira’s debut feature film, Under the Flags, the Sun, is a profound exploration of Stroessner’s dictatorship almost entirely made with archival footage, the film crafts a portrait of the open wounds of the 34-year dictatorship. The film premieres tonight at the Berlinale.
Filmmaker: I wanted to start by asking about sound, especially as it relates to the aspect of nature which is also in the title— “the sun.” There are many sounds of nature: wind, flies, thunder. Could you tell me a little bit about that decision to build a soundscape linked to natural elements?
Pereira: At the beginning, we wanted to make an observational film where you could listen to nature, like the first part set in the Paraguayan countryside. Then I changed my mind completely, because I realized that I wanted the film to be a sum of things that would make your head explode. As we broke away from some of the ideas we had about the countryside, we started working on the voices. We didn’t want my or some Paraguayan historian’s voice-over. While we wanted to keep the point of view of the archives themselves, we also wanted to gesture towards a feeling of presence. We played a lot with sound. With the flies, we emphasized the idea of a rotten government. With the storm, we wanted to point out that all those people who were there with him were looking at him as if he were a shrine in the rain. With Julián [Galay, the sound designer], we tried translating the texture of the image into sound with a lot of crackling sounds. We sought to demonstrate that an archive is not only influenced by images, but also by the sound textures and spatiality: we respected the room tone of each archive. From the very beginning of this project, we worked a lot on these sound gestures. Julian also did a lot of research on his own about Paraguay. He handed me a sound catalog and we started editing. Sound was present throughout our process; we never edited a scene without thinking about the sound. Manuel Embalse [editor] is a musician and sound designer too. While I’m not a musician, I’m very interested in sound design and was able to direct that part. We formed this sound-focused trio with Manuel, Julian and myself, and even if the film was my idea, their ideas added up so much that I really feel we made the film together. Also, the music was done by my friend and my roommate, Randy [Andrés Montero Bustamante]. Except for Juli, who lives in Berlin, we were all working very closely, then I came last year to work on sound for the final cut with him.
Filmmaker: Speaking of sound, I wanted to ask you about the songs you mention praising Stroessner. It was interesting to me that the film doesn’t cite any of the resistance songs. How did you go about making these decisions in the construction of that soundscape?
Pereira: The truth is, the film is not a resistance film. We didn’t develop that part because we found hardly any footage from the resistance. The few accounts we found were mainly from the French press that filmed isolated interviews in Paris: one man talking about his sister, the other of a man denouncing torture he had endured while he was imprisoned. French journalists also went to Paraguay. We couldn’t find archives like those of The Battle of Chile, for example. I am sure they exist, but I didn’t find them in my research. Therefore, we decided to work with everything related to power, including music produced by power. We chose to include the polkas that everyone listened to at parties, schools, public events during that time. More specifically, the film is about the disintegration of power based on the material we found. At times, we considered inserting elements about the resistance, but since we had access to very little, we needed to expand on that theme. For instance, there were photos or newspaper clippings about the guerrillas, but I needed to develop that subject in order to use that material, and I didn’t have the body to do it. The film doesn’t claim that there was no resistance, but its focus is to portray power.
Filmmaker: Shifting to the image, I know you worked with more than a hundred hours of material and noticed, especially at the beginning of the film, that many times the camera lingers on the faces of children. You were born after the fall of the Stronismo, but how much is that a reference to your own gaze? What were you looking for in those children’s eyes?
Pereira: We paused on those children because Paraguay is a country built under military ideology even before Stroessner. Military children have been an important figure since the war of the Triple Alliance in 1870. Paraguay was annihilated in that war and, in its last battle, the president sent all the children dressed as soldiers, with fake mustaches, fake beards. The Brazilian army killed all those children, which impacted everyone’s life. Children’s Day in Paraguay is the day of that battle, Acosta Ñu. Taking that into account and also the passage of time, we wanted to show that there is a whole generation who appear at the beginning of the film and we wanted to show those young people at the end of the film 35 years later. It marks a whole journey of those children who witnessed him becoming president, then also voted for him, listened to those songs, repeated all those phrases and watched all of those images. We wanted to mark that passage of time and that embedded figure of the military child.
This isn’t said in the film explicitly; it’s more of a sensation than an explanation. There are several moments in which, for example, when [Jorge Rafael] Videla appears, there are some military children playing, then there is a child cleaning a soldier’s boot. There is a sequence of looks of frightened children. We used the official footage but tried to focus on that gaze and explore that aspect. Given the little we had—we don’t have the vast archive that Mexico, Chile or Argentina have—we gathered what we could, which is all there is in Paraguay and in the world. Surely there is more, but we wanted to capture that sensibility that offers an alternative to the political discourse. We tried to establish that contrast between Stroessner talking about his great eloquence or his lies, so to speak, and how those words also affected those children who saw him over and over again—first in black and white, then in 35mm, and finally in VHS or in Matic at the end of the film.
Filmmaker: Red is a politically charged color normally associated with communism, the left. As mentioned at the beginning of the film, in Paraguay the Colorado Party is a right-wing party. I noticed that you use red to provide rhythm in the film. Could you share something about the relationship between the formal aspect of the color and its use in the film with the ideological symbolism within the context of Paraguay?
Pereira: We explained that at the beginning to make it clear that it’s not the communist party. For me it was like a way of saying, “The Colorado Party did this. Look at the red, hold on to this image for a little while.” It was a visual that I chose not only for pacing, but also as a moment to point out that the Colorado Party is here, that it is the one that is doing all this. We used five reds. The first red has a filmic texture and the last one has a VHS texture. We wanted to show the temporal shifts held within that texture; the Colorado Party represents the passage of time. I was obsessed with producing something plastic and couldn’t find it until I remembered that I had made a short film where we worked with colors. In that cut, I also left the entire screen with one color. I like that purity of color, when a full screen immerses you visually. It serves not just as a moment to pause but also to remember the color and what it signifies, what it’s associated with.
Filmmaker: We know that dictatorships often rely on the cult of personality, as was the case with Stroessner. In that sense, in the last part of the film, you mention the statue as symbolism. The only image you film is of the feet of Stroessner’s fallen statue. For you, why was it so important to capture this image and what new meaning did you want to give it?
Pereira: The question was always, “How do we make an archival film and talk about the present?” At one point, we began to gather a lot of footage from today’s television channels to show how certain things still carry on. For instance, people continue to celebrate Stroessner’s birthday. I kept coming back to this abstract idea and was constantly preoccupied with finding symbolism. I was frustrated with the spoken word and how no one ever shuts up, even in the media today. I was more interested in portraying what was unseen, hidden and not part of the conversation.
I did not know that statue was still there but did know about its history, because it was taken down and a very important Paraguayan artist, Carlos Colombino, was commissioned to make a piece from the statue. Next to the government palace in Asunción, on the plaza of the disappeared, the piece distorts the statue as it is crushed by the weight of the sculpture. You see Stroessner’s hand, his face—you see everything, but you don’t see his foot. I worked with many people on this film because I needed help, especially in terms of the historical aspect. A historian friend of mine was working with me and one day I told her that I was having trouble finding the ending. She told me about the foot and I went to see what was left of this statue. I couldn’t see the feet, because it is twenty meters high. So we rented a drone and there we saw it. We put that shot in the edit as a draft. It was the symbol we needed, the one that tells you that nothing has changed. That also added to the decision to open the shot: the whole film is in 4:3 and there it’s in 16:9. I was interested in filming something rather than using a piece of current footage and for me, that little gesture summarizes the present. Obviously there are many, many ways to do so.
I didn’t want to avoid talking about the resistance. I wanted the film to be firm in its approach;; I didn’t want to simply include details relating to its existence, but I wanted them to be based on the material produced by mass media. I feel that the resistance film is another film. Maybe it can be the next one or someone else can make it after this. I didn’t want the film to have an absolutist perspective on what happened and the truth. The archive reveals itself. I also didn’t want to carry the burden of retelling the history of my country. It is too much weight, especially because I didn’t even live under the dictatorship. It’s 35 years of which I obviously couldn’t include a lot of things. So when I chose the images I wanted to show, the intention was also to start a conversation.
Filmmaker: I was very struck by this constant interaction of the archive speaking for itself and the symbolism that emerges from the color and sound intervention. When I saw the film I was thinking a lot about the fact that I don’t have that many Latin American references for that kind of cinema. I can think of several that construct a narrative from a family archive or with voiceover—they are very personal examples—but I can think of very few that offer a broader representation of history. I wanted to ask you about your references, especially if they were regional or if you were inspired by works outside Latin America?
Pereira: First of all, Paraguay is very different from any other country in Latin America in terms of cinematography. At the same time, I imagine we have the same references: Still Burn (2018) in Bolivia, The Battle of Chile (1975-1979) and Argentina also has many examples. I was finding it difficult to make something similar to those examples because I simply didn’t have the same material. When I saw Chris Marker’s Grin Without a Cat (1977), I became motivated to find this kind of footage in Paraguay and couldn’t find it. Then I saw A German Youth (2015), and again I was eager to find material on the student movement in Paraguay. Then I found other references like The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu (2010), about the dictatorship in Romania, based on propaganda material. I then saw Sergei Loznitsa’s State Funeral (2019) and Ruth Beckermann’s The Waldheim Waltz (2018), about [Kurt] Waldheim, a former Nazi running for prime minister in Austria who won. I kept collecting these references but wasn’t finding, in the cinema of the ’60s, ’70s in Latin America, something I could relate to. So, in the end, I kind of invented a film.
I have so many references in the film—there are millions! For example, there’s a film by a Finnish director, Mika Tamila, that I love, Tectonic Plate (2016). He made an experimental film about airplane tickets. There’s a scene where I talk about Josef Mengele where I wanted to do something similar. The film also references Marker, especially with certain aspects of the sound design. But again, I was unable to create a film that had a Latin American influence based on local references such as those of the cinema novo-brasileiro. As Paraguay doesn’t have a rich cinematographic history, we fell a little short. Think about the fact that the dictatorship fell in 1989 and this is the first film based on archival footage. I thought that someone older than me would have already done something like this, but all the other Paraguayan films talk about other subjects or are linked to the dictatorship, but never exclusively. So, I had to come up with a way to do this.
I was most concerned with trying to show what happened, or more so, letting the archive show. Besides the fact that I enjoy cataloguing and that this was a fascinating exercise, we always had in mind the question of who were making this film for. Is it for Paraguay or for the world? How important is this film for Latin America? Is it for Argentina (I lived in Argentina)? Is it for the French? Who is it for?’ At one point we found that the film does not tell us about the past, but rather the present. Obviously it can’t escape from its local context, but because so much of the footage was produced abroad, this film isn’t just for the Paraguay community. All the French, German, English voices present in the film show that this is an international plot; if the material was from Paraguay, it would have been another film, but only 25% of the film is from the national archive, everything else is from abroad. That also speaks of the lack of Paraguayan narratives, and in the absence of a cinematographic reference, I had to invent something.
Filmmaker: I actually wanted to ask you about this notion of memory and your viewers. You are about to premiere your film in front of an audience in Germany. You show the Stronato’s relationship with the CIA and Stroessner’s protection of Nazi officials in Paraguay. What sort of reaction do you expect to generate with an audience that might not be familiar with the history of your country but might start to connect the dots after seeing your film?
Pereira: I honestly never thought it would be premiering at the Berlinale. I can speak for myself and the whole crew when I say making this film was a very enjoyable process. I received feedback throughout from Antes Muerto Cine, so it wasn’t just me choosing what I was going to do. It was important for me to have their input, because I admire their work a lot. We talked a lot about the significance of the dictatorship in Paraguay, which is not the same as the dictatorship in Argentina∏they are totally different things. So, the concepts change. In Paraguay, if you say “worker,” you’re not referring to the worker’s party. In Argentina, “worker” has to do with a party, with a social class and with a lot of other things. Since I live in Argentina, the film was born in another country, so I was trying to constantly bring it back to its origins. We also ended up going to Paraguay to edit, and that was amazing.
In relation to your question, I think the film became an international counter-mega hybrid, in which an Argentinian may see the film in one way, a Paraguayan may see the film one way, a German will see the film another way, a Frenchman will see the film another way, and a Yankee will see the film in another way. The German press also shows that Stroessner traveled to Germany and people protested outside of the Ministry of International Affairs because he was throwing people in the jungle. There’s a very strong contradiction, because on the one hand these countries were willing to point out the atrocities and human rights violations, but on the other hand they were also complicit with the regime.The film tries to track these two points of view. For instance, at the end of the film, when the statue falls we mention the fact that two people were interested in purchasing it. One was a fan and another wanted to recycle it.
I mean, here’s the question: Stroessner imprisoned people arbitrarily. He tortured, disappeared, killed and the media reported it, but global power approved it. It’s the same thing that happens with Israel and Palestine, with Trump, with Elon Musk. We all have Twitter and that same guy is funding everything. In the end, it’s a film about hypocrisy. The message was not to say that Stroessner was bad; we already know that. The film is satirical, the intention was for it to be a game, to be a big joke on the politicians of the day, and in that sense I think I’m happy with the result.
Filmmaker: At the end, you mention the Truth and Justice Commission, created in 2003m and its final report from 2020, which talks about the 20,090 direct victims of human rights violations. Again thinking about this collective memory and the work it involves, what can we expect from images? When I saw the film, I thought about Forensic Architecture’s research, with whom Julian Galay, in addition to his work in film, also collaborates with. One of FA’s core fundamental questions is how to represent violence, especially state violence. I think this connects to the final sentence of the film, as these types of commissions have much clearer objectives than the images. The prior looks for evidence in facts and figures, but I think perhaps the latter proposes a much more abstract exploration of the truth. What do or what can we expect from this visual and sound investigation?
Pereira: For me it is very difficult to define the film, whether it is an archeology, an essay documentary, an essay film or a documentary. It’s quite eclectic in that sense, but what I tried to do was to add up the answers. If I choose to show something, I feel that at some point in the film, I have to respond to it. For example, if I choose to show the Itaipu dam, later on I have to explain why I showed it. There’s a moment when we hear Margarita Báez’s brother fighting to free her from France, and there’s also footage of this man who shares his testimony after getting out. Both are included in the Archive of Terror. Why did I choose to include these two documents and not everything inside this archive? Because they were the only two testimonies that I found in my research, literally. In all of the hundred hours of material I consulted, that’s it. When we show footage of the Archive of Terror, that’s when we stopped intervening with the sound. Juli and I felt that once we start showing that footage, that’s the end of the joke. It’s straight documentary filmmaking: there is no sound, everything happens as it was found. What we found was not found in that archive but I felt that, in this system that I established, if in minute ten I talk about something, I need to answer that in minute 45. So that’s why I mention the Truth and Justice Commission, which was triggered by the discovery of the Archive of Terror. At first I didn’t want to write anything, I wanted to let the film end with the image of the statue’s feet. While we get some audiovisual answers, in order to not omit certain parts, the film had to speak with words.
In the case of Stroessner, we see him flee to Brazil and then we don’t know what happens, visually. Therefore, it was important for me to mention that he was never tried and died peacefully in that mansion we saw him in. Also with the Colorado Party, we see [Andrés] Rodríguez with a red balloon and it seems that nothing has changed. In that sense, I needed to resolve the question of the Archive of Terror, including the numerical data that I couldn’t explore through the image. I didn’t show 337 disappeared, or footage of tortured or dead people. I didn’t include that because I didn’t have that footage and because I wouldn’t have included it either way, because it’s sensationalist in my opinion. I felt I could not ignore the information from the Commission. In fact, it was what I wanted viewers to walk away with after seeing the film. After having the portrayal of the media and the way I manipulate those images, I wanted viewers to have a sense of what really happened. The Truth and Justice Commission is an extremely important document for Paraguay, and for Latin America as well. Argentineans still don’t have access to the archives of the dictatorship. In Paraguay, anyone can access the report online and you can also visit the archives in person. The film maps a journey from a beginning filled with promise, how this system starts to rot progressively over time and at the end, this Archive, and its response with that data, which for me was important to share and end with.
Filmmaker: You mentioned Ante Muerto Cine, and I was just talking to Tati[ana Mazú González] a couple of months ago about the importance of showing films as well. She was telling me about the R.A.T.A. film club, a project in which Manu also participates. A couple of years ago, you started to organize a film festival in Asunción (ASU.FIC). How do you link this exhibition project with the process of making a film about archives, especially considering that they were simultaneous?
Pereira: I didn’t find a way to work for the state. I edited the whole film while working eight hours. That’s just the way it is. In the last three years, I found moments of refuge where I was editing the film and doing well. I would put the film together and forget that I worked all day on something else. Because of my personality, I’m always doing things, moving around from one place to another. I’m not going to show the film at the festival anyway, because I don’t think it’s right. ASU.FIC is a space where people can watch films, where they can participate in the lab and start making films. With this project that I’m finishing now, I’m trying to get people to take a theme that interests them and develop it because there are so many threads to pull. What I could say is that the film and the festival are designed to ignite, not in an absolutist way.
