92 minutes / Color/B&W
Guarani; Spanish; German; French; English; Portuguese / English subtitles
Closed Captioned
Release: 2025
Copyright: 2025
In 1989, the fall of Alfredo Stroessner’s 35-year dictatorship in Paraguay marked the end of one of the world’s longest authoritarian regimes, but also the abandonment of the audiovisual archives that had cemented its power. This footage, crafted to shape a national identity and celebrate the regime, was left to fade from memory.
Decades later, a trove of unseen and long forgotten footage—as newsreels, public television broadcasts, propaganda films, and declassified documents —has been recovered from Paraguay and abroad, revealing the hidden mechanisms of power behind Stroessner’s rule.
A visual experience through the history of the media, covering all the supports that have been able to store pieces of memory during the 20th century. The found footage reflects the appropriation of the past to indoctrinate, the construction of a national imaginary, and the cult of Stroessner. The foreign archives narrate the Cold War, international alliances and the power game that allowed the dictatorship to prosper, in addition to denouncing propaganda and oppression. It is an archeology of the present, in a country where the descendants of the regime's leaders still rule.
“Under the Flags, the Sun is thus not only a cinematic memorial to the victims of the Stroessner dictatorship, but also a plea to look the past in the eye—and recognize the mechanisms that make dictatorships possible. This may be more important today than anyone could have imagined just a few years ago.” —Film-rezensionen.de
“Pereira develops a kaleidoscopic vision of his country under Stroessner’s regime, a form of visually rich jigsaw, allowing the viewers to think and build their own judgment on what they are witnessing. The strength of [his] film lies not only in its way of deconstructing the image of this regime, relatively unknown in the western world compared to the dictatorships of Brazil, Chile or Argentina, but also in allowing us to meditate on the dynamic power that determines the relationships between the West, particularly the United States, and the Third World during the Cold War and, in some respects, practically up to the present days.” —FIPRESCI (International Federation of Film Critics)
“What with the current turmoil that Western politics finds itself in, Under the Flags, the Sun is an important film in its own right to underline the dangers of authoritarian strongmen.” —International Cinephile Society
“Under the Flags, the Sun is undoubtedly highly effective in relaying to the average viewer what exactly happened in Paraguay from the ‘50s onwards.” —Cineuropa
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