Tembiapo Pyharegua

Edited by: Elvira Sánchez Poxon & Christian Bagnat

World première

Wishes, dreams, plans for the future: every day they are spoken aloud, like an incantation. A record of a future being constructed slowly, night by night. A cinematic chronicle of the life of a Guaraní-speaking Paraguayan community living in Cuenca, Spain. A weave of experiences in which filming is like existing.

It seems that dreaming is the real night work, and night is the time that gives form to this mass made of present, past, future and everything that's invented. The work the mind does when we aren't watching. It's everything that isn't - really - work, but free time, truly free and filled with curiosity. Tembiapo pyharegua follows the nights (which are sometimes days, moments of spiritual night) of a migrant community in Cuenca, people from Paraguay who speak Guaraní, among themselves and with the film. It follows them in different ways, as in episodes. There are stories about birds captured by kings, coming-out dances, first love, sections in which the story of migration merges into the landscape, the desire to return to a place of their own..., as if the film wanted to think of an infinite number of forms for a flat plane to take, because there are an infinite number of ways of being far from home. The thing about migration is that it happens all the time, in a story with no end because life splits up and is repeated: life there, where one sometimes is like a ghost; life here, where one lives somewhat absently, running the risk of becoming invisible. There is a shared dream, but one with infinite variations: going back. And then? A dream that might be anxious nightmares. This dream is the film, which is a bright, artificial, democratic night.

Lucía Salas