Under the Flags, the Sun (2025), de Juanjo Pereira

In Under the Flags, the Sun, Paraguayan filmmaker Juanjo Pereira reconstructs the darkest years of his country through images rescued from oblivion. More than a conventional historical documentary, his film is a sensorial experience that seeks to capture the density of a frozen time: the regime of Alfredo Stroessner, which lasted 35 years, from 1954 to 1989, with a repressive intensity that was as persistent as it was opaque. What is remarkable about this project is not only the amount of material gathered—newsreel fragments, propaganda pieces, international reports, and declassified documents—but the way these images are juxtaposed to build a rough-edged collage, with no narrative voice or contemporary interviews to guide the viewer. Everything is told with the remains that the regime itself failed to erase.

As the film begins, a title card warns: there are hardly any surviving film archives from those years in Paraguay. Not because nothing was filmed, but because much was destroyed by the dictatorship. This initial gesture sets the tone: it is about searching through what was left out, what was accidentally saved or dispersed beyond the country’s borders. Pereira recovers that lost history from the margins, with materials sourced from other countries—France, the United States, Argentina, Japan—where Stroessner was welcomed with honors despite the reports of systematic human rights violations.

The narrative, far from unfolding linearly, jumps from topic to topic: an official visit abroad, a report on the construction of a dam, the harrowing testimony of a tortured dissident, a frozen image of the country’s militarized routine. This scattered structure is not an aesthetic whim but reflects a deeper truth: Paraguay’s official history was broken, unraveled by power, and reconstructing it also means embracing its fractures. The film thus becomes an archive of archives, a testimony in shards. One of the most unsettling segments addresses the protection Stroessner offered to Nazi war criminals, including the infamous doctor Josef Mengele. Although the episode is covered briefly, it is enough to set a chilling tone. In Paraguay, under his regime, Europe’s darkest past found refuge, and the dictator knew how to use that ambiguity to his advantage: authoritarianism, order, Catholicism, anti-communism. A sinister mirror of other dictatorships in the region. Not for nothing was Paraguay known as “the poor man’s Nazi regime.”

The film also subtly reveals international complicity. Stroessner travels, smiles, shakes hands with presidents and monarchs. He is seen alongside Videla, the Itaipú Dam agreement with Brazil is celebrated, doors are opened for him in Europe. A visit to his hometown in Germany is met with only a mild protest by humanitarian organizations. The final scene, already in his Brazilian exile, shows him walking through his garden like an untouchable old man. He was never brought to justice.

Beyond its informative value, there is something deeply unsettling in the very texture of the film. The sound design—almost entirely composed of ambient noises, buzzing, thunder, and creaking—infuses the images with an oppressive tone even when what is shown appears innocent. It’s as if horror might erupt at any moment. This invisible tension gives the film a muffled, persistent emotional weight. Adding to this are the red hues—the color of the Colorado Party—that run through many scenes, creating a discomforting visual echo, a multilayered aesthetic irony. Under the Flags, the Sun does not offer answers, nor does it attempt to explain everything. It is a film that trusts in the power of images and in the viewer’s intelligence to read between the lines. Its greatest strength lies in showing how terror installs itself not only through explicit brutality but also in everyday gestures, naïve propaganda, and collective acceptance. And how that logic, albeit disguised as modernity, continues to operate in the present.