The documentary feature Nothing but the Sun / Apenas el sol by director Arami Ullón has been selected as Paraguay’s official submission for International Feature Film at the 94th Academy Awards. This marks the fourth time that the South American country selects an Oscar contender, and the second time that a film by Ullón represents the country after Cloudy Times / Tiempo nublado became the first Paraguayan Oscar contender in 2015.
Hailed as “powerful and moving” by Screen International, Nothing but the Sun had its world premiere last November as opening night film at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), and it will have its U.S. premiere at DOC NYC in a few days.
The film tells the story of Mateo Sobode Chiqueno who has been recording stories, songs, and testimonies of his Ayoreo people since the seventies, facing the consequences of a violent uprooting. In an attempt to preserve fragments of a disappearing culture, Mateo walks across communities in the arid and desolate Paraguayan Chaco region, and registers on cassettes the experiences of other Ayoreo who, like him, were born in the vast forest, free and nomadic, without any contact with white civilization, until religious missionaries forced them to abandon their ancestral territory, their means of subsistence, their beliefs and their home.
