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HAMACA PARAGUANA (Paraguay, 2006, d. by Paz Encina) Print E-mail
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Written by Peter Malone   
Monday, 29 May 2006

For serious and art cinema audiences, this is a cinema essay.

The setting is June 14th, 1935, during the Chaco war in Paraguay.  An old couple venture out of the jungle into a clearing and set up a hammock.  They wait and they talk.  The director uses long takes, middle distance shots for most of the film – there are some close-ups, but few of them.  The soundtrack is voiced over conversation between the two, the old woman doing most of the talking.  They commune, they wait, they wonder about their son coming back from the war or if he is already dead.

It is hot.  They wait for rain.  While there is continual thunder, the storm does not break until the very end of the film when, with black screen, we hear the pouring rain.

The film is spoken in the Guarani language which means that the film is something of an ethnographical portrait and an anthropological study of people and attitudes in the jungle of the 1930s.




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