The Paraguayan film Nothing but the Sun / Apenas el sol, the second feature film by Switzerland-based director Arami Ullón, has been announced as the opening selection at the 33rd annual edition of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), in its world premiere.
A quietly earth-shattering film, Nothing but the Sun lucidly contrasts the hot, arid atmosphere of Paraguay’s Chaco region with the devastating stories of the Ayoreo people, an Indigenous community violently uprooted from their ancestral territory by white missionaries. Between past and present, forest and desert, folk songs and church hymns, Ullón’s poetic feature lays bare the raw emotions of the human condition, seen through a culture on the brink of disappearing, but not without a voice.
Nothing but the Sun, which will participate in the IDFA Competition for Feature-Length Documentary along with eleven other international titles, follows Mateo Sobode Chiquenoi, an Ayoreo native, who lived free and nomadic, isolated, without any contacts with civilization, until religious missionaries force him to leave the woods. Now Mateo is getting old. This is when, with the help of the film crew, he decides to embark on a journey through the immense and desolate Paraguayan Chaco, in search of the last living Ayoreo elders who can help him reconstruct the memory of that home that was taken from them.
Ullón’s 2014 debut feature, Cloudy Times, became Paraguay’s first ever submission for the Academy Awards. “When I left Paraguay almost 13 years ago, I was not aware of the existence of people still living in isolation in the Paraguayan Chaco region,” said Ullón quoted by Deadline. “Eight years ago I read about them in an article and learned that most of them have been systematically exiled since the 1960s, but there are still groups that live free and nomadic, without contact with the white world. This revelation confronted me with my own ignorance of the diverse realities that constitute the Paraguay that I left behind.”
IDFA, the largest documentary film festival in the world, will take place this year in a hybrid format between November 18 - December 6.
