Juanjo Pereira: “From Oppression, Something New Emerges”
The director on his award-winning Under the Flags, the Sun
General Alfredo Stroessner smiles broadly as President Pompidou welcomes him to Paris in 1973. Activists wave placards, trying to draw attention to torture and disappearances committed by Paraguay’s longest-lasting authoritarian regime.
Some years earlier, papers are signed granting Nazi fugitive Josef Mengele Paraguayan citizenship. Decades later, now in exile, Stroessner shuffles through his garden in Brazil — while his toppled statue gathers dust in a warehouse back home.
These are among the fragments pieced together by director Juanjo Pereira (31) in his multi-award-winning documentary, Under the Flags, the Sun, which has been selected as Paraguay’s submission to the 2026 Academy Awards.
The documentary — which has its Paraguayan premiere this week — was created entirely from more than 80 hours of forgotten archival footage that Pereira sifted through in Paraguay, Argentina, Brazil, Europe, Japan, Taiwan, the United States, UK and beyond.
Constructing a chilling, mesmerising mosaic of official propaganda videos and foreign news reels, the film examines how the media helped construct and buttress Stroessner’s 1954-89 reign of terror, control the collective memory, and leave a legacy of fear — one that still resonates in Paraguay today, where the dictator’s Colorado Party remains in power.
Since its debut earlier this year in the Berlinale’s Panorama section — where it picked up the prestigious FIPRESCI Prize — Bajo las Banderas, El Sol has continued to draw critical acclaim at film festivals around the world for its innovative, eerie and topical portrayal of a society caught in the grip of authoritarian rule.
Cinema is one of the most powerful forms of artistic expression. To talk about film, archives or images is to talk about society – to talk about ourselves, our relationships with each other, and the ways in which the historical processes of our societies unfold.
Yet as Georges Didi-Huberman once wrote, images are untrustworthy because they inevitably carry the cultural imprint of their time. It’s an uneasiness Pereira seeks to capture in his debut feature.
The Paraguay Post caught up with Pereira to hear more about the film and his training with archives, as well as the Asunción International Contemporary Film Festival (ASUFICC), of which he is artistic director and co-founder.
From Buenos Aires to Berlin
TPP: Where did you learn your craft, and when did you first get into film?
JP: I was born and raised in Asunción. As a teenager I used to rent films from a video club just three blocks from my house. I watched everything they had, then moved on to independent cinema, which I really enjoyed. At 17 I decided to move to Buenos Aires to study. After finishing school, I enrolled at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), in the Faculty of Architecture.
I studied a degree called Image and Sound Design, which combines many different audiovisual disciplines. It gives you a solid foundation in cinema, but also branches into other areas. Later, I did a documentary filmmaking course in France. In 2018 I won the Lumière Award from the Alliance Française, one of the first prizes that connected me to the international scene.
After that, I took part in workshops in London, Germany, Spain and Switzerland, figuring out what I wanted to do. I ended up developing an approach which tends towards the flexible and experimental, playing between documentary and fiction.
Can you tell us some more about the idea behind the film festival you run, ASUFICC?
Films need a space to be shown and discussed — otherwise they end up being made and then forgotten on a hard drive somewhere. The cultural spaces Asunción has today were basically the same as 15 years ago: mostly European embassies offering programmes of their own countries’ cinema. The first films I ever saw came through those foreign initiatives.
I began to realise that Paraguayan narratives were marked by a kind of cultural and geopolitical blockage. There’s a gulf compared to our neighbours in terms of cinematic culture. It also means you don’t really look at yourself as a society. We wanted to work on that: what is Paraguay today, what kind of cinema do we want to show, and how do we find the language of new generations?
That’s how ASUFICC was born. Now in its fifth year, it’s growing fast. We’re delighted to see audiences engaging with the festival, because it’s made for regular people — and the reciprocity is really exciting. It’s generating new languages, new films, and shaping new audiences. We try to programme films that speak directly to Paraguayan society and make them accessible — which is why the festival is free.
There’s a similar thought process behind my own film. The biggest challenge was to make cinema in a new language. I wanted to find a way to tell a complex story in my own way, not to repeat formulas. I believe there are many different ways to tell things, and that plurality is what makes an artistic language strong.
The Stroessner regime
When did you first become aware of what the Stroessner regime and Operation Condor meant for Paraguay and the wider region? At what point did you decide to investigate it?
In Paraguay the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-70) is imprinted on our minds from an early age; it follows us in every possible way. We’re deeply marked by it: for example, Children’s Day, which commemorates the mass killing of Paraguayan child soldiers by the Brazilian invaders. So it was like starting to let go of that distant past.
Being Paraguayan in Buenos Aires gives you perspective. You see how many Paraguayans are there, and you realise all those people left because of the political and economic circumstances back home. I wanted to understand where that came from. I wanted to know why my grandparents left in the 1960s, what was happening in Paraguay that made them take that decision.
For me it was more important to look at that period in order to understand my own present, rather than just going back to 1870. The film is, in a way, a process of learning about the political forces that shaped the country at that time. I decided to illustrate the political happenings of a small country which, improbably, became a key chess piece geopolitically. Stroessner was central to Operation Condor.
I wanted to explore that, though always from a theoretical standpoint. I didn’t approach it from the angle of human rights activism: I didn’t work with victims or resistance groups. I left aside that aspect of the dictatorship and instead focused more on political science, political theory and economics.
How did you approach working with archival footage?
In Paraguay we’re steeped in dictatorships: from Doctor Francia, through Marshal López — depending on whether you count him — then Higinio Morínigo and Alfredo Stroessner. That’s why I chose to work directly with official materials from authoritarian sources. I felt these archives carried enormous weight, and I wanted to flip them around, to ridicule that political power that had done the country so much harm.
A historian friend once told me the best way to tackle a subject is not to have lived through it. I never experienced the dictatorship myself, so I could look at it from another angle. For someone born in 1954, like my mother, it’s a completely different relationship with the material — more painful and personal. This isn’t an all-encompassing film; it’s my version of the story I wanted to tell. For me, these were some of the more canonical events within those audiovisual archives.
On my computer I keep a line from a film by Chris Marker, a director who has inspired my work:
If the images of the present don’t change, then change the images of the past.
That idea is always in my head. It’s also about stripping away some of the reverence for these images, stripping away the respect we give to the image of a dictator. Why should we respect him? None of those figures from that period deserve any respect at all.
Under the Flags, the Sun
What did you discover about Stroessner’s regime while making this film?
I discovered that, while Stroessner rarely spoke on camera, audiovisual media was central to his propaganda. Short newsreels were produced every week about Stroessner, or ministers inaugurating public works, and shown in cinemas before the main feature.
I learned that he had significant international backing, though with some controversy in certain countries. He stopped giving interviews after an encounter with a US reporter, Frank Scherschel, who ridiculed him. From then on, whenever journalists visited, he demanded written questions, and in many interviews you can clearly see him reading his answers.
What struck me in the footage was the fear in children’s eyes at the time, and the patriarchal power of the military over underage girls. That’s terrible. You can see how the streets were full of soldiers.
Everything was named after Stroessner. The narrative was of a country that was progressing, but in reality it was as poor as before. The Itaipú Dam and the Hotel Guaraní were just façades. What I saw in those images was a deep sense of oppression.
What was it like doing this almost archaeological work, diving into Paraguay’s scattered historiography?
While making this film I worked delivering ice cream and later in an advertising company, always just trying to pay rent and get by. That’s why the film took such a long time. I didn’t have the luxury of eight hours a day to dedicate to it. It was crazy to be working such long hours, but the film kept me afloat, it saved me from falling into corporate monotony. It gave me the chance to find my most creative side. I’d carve out scraps of time to work on it — like any tired worker, seeking a balance between the day job and this.
Later I took a course in archival research, which gave me more precise tools to work with. Each archive has its own story. I approached it as a whole at first, then went deeper by country and by theme. We spent a year and a half just watching the material. After that, we had to decide what to include and what to leave out. A lot had to be cut, but obviously you can’t fully cover 35 years in 90 minutes.
I’m certain I don’t even know 2% of what the dictatorship really was, because I didn’t live through it, and I didn’t study it at the depth of a thesis. And a film isn’t a thesis — for me, it’s a vehicle of sensations. I’m not here to detail every single event of the dictatorship, but to convey, through images and sound, some of the feelings it left behind and some of its most indelible moments.
Why did the film premiere in Germany? How was it received there?
The Berlinale is a major festival, and I felt it was a fitting stage for the film: Stroessner was from a German family. During the Berlinale, Germany was holding its most fraught elections since the fall of Hitler. The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) was polling at 30% of the vote. In that sense, Berlin was the perfect place for the film, to spark that kind of dialogue.
What impact would you like this film to have on Paraguayan society?
I see myself as a channel for organising and questioning the things that interest me, but I’m not an absolutist about truth. It’s not an easy subject, and it’s not one where you can sit in the middle. Beyond this film, I think there’s a whole generation of young people trying to challenge everything that’s engulfing us culturally and politically right now.
The dominance of the Colorado Party is so strong that it sometimes blinds us to other possible horizons. But films like this — these gestures — are small grains of sand that help us keep looking forward. I do believe in a future, I don’t want to be pessimistic. Even the title reflects that: under the flags — whether of the Colorado Party, of Paraguay, or as symbols themselves — there is a sun, something trying to break through. Beneath what oppresses, something new is bound to emerge.
I hope the film opens up dialogue, that people can better understand that political process — a regime whose economic consequences we are still paying for today.
Reflections on Paraguayan cinema
What was the relationship between Stroessner’s regime and film?
Based on the information I have, the first fully Paraguayan-produced film was Cerro Corá, financed by the Colorado Party under Stroessner with the aim of glorifying Marshal López’s end during the last battle of the Triple Alliance War. The regime made sure the symbolism of war was repeated over and over, starting with that very first film.
That said, the political power of Stroessner’s regime didn’t fully extend into audiovisual media. There wasn’t a large-scale, mass-produced audiovisual narrative, like Leni Riefenstahl in Nazi Germany. Paraguay didn’t produce grandiose films to represent the dictator. They made one or two, but there was no strategy to make a film every year. They didn’t see it as necessary.
Nor was there a culture of documentary-making that sought to work against Stroessner. There were isolated cases — for instance, Carlos Saguier was able to pioneer a more experimental cinema — but for the most part, audiovisual work in Paraguay during that period has many lacunae and silences.
How do you see the current and future landscape of Paraguayan cinema?
Things have come on since then. I see the films that are submitted to ASUFICC, I see the progress, how filmmakers are moving away from repeating the same formulas. Slowly, Paraguayan reality is starting to appear on screen — it’s unique and powerful. The creation of the National Audiovisual Institute of Paraguay (INAP) has been a huge step forward in film funding. Ten years ago, it would have been impossible to imagine what’s happening today.
The government needs to continue investing in audiovisual work, in new languages, and in narrative storytelling. Culture isn’t an optional extra, culture isn’t a product — culture and film especially are about looking at ourselves and our society. They form part of a country’s collective memory.
We need to fund works that interrogate our history, our present, and our future. Paraguayan cinema is moving in that direction. We have to keep supporting it with public policies that have a meaningful impact, so that progress doesn’t falter.
The Asunción International Contemporary Film Festival (ASUFICC) runs from October 7-12.
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