A Rotterdam Tiger Award winner for “Eami,” and Cannes Un Certain Regard Fipresci laureate for “Paraguayan Hammock,” Paz Encina is prepping her fourth feature, “The Unique Time” (“El Tiempo Único”), set to be brought to market at Locarno’s Open Doors.
In development, and written by Encina, the film begins – though Encina suggests she will conflate pasts and present, suggesting one continuum – in Paso de la Patria, in Argentina, Paraguay across the confluence of two rivers. A family – Lorenza (70) and Pedro (73),their children – await news of Máximo, their youngest son who was 22 when he disappeared, and of Paraguay. One morning, Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner is overthrown. “Exile has come to an end, but how does one return after twenty five years? What is one’s homeland? How does one face something one has waited so long for? And Máximo?” the synopsis asks.
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“This family must decide what to do next, now that freedom has arrived. From an emptiness that lives relentlessly inside them, each of them will take a different path,” it ends.
“The Unique Time” is set up as a production of Gabriela Sabaté’s Sabaté Films, behind Hugo Giménez’s “Killing the Dead,” Paraguay’s2020 Oscar submission, Juan Carlos Maneglia and Tana Schémbori 2017 “The Gold Seekers,” and Encina’s “The Paraguayan Hammock.”
Julio Chavezmontes’ Piano will produce out of Mexico. Founded in 2011, the production-distribution house has a sustained history of co-producing major festival titles such as Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness. Further production credits take in Léos Carax’s “Annette,” Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s “Memoria” and Mia Hansen-Løve’s “Bergman Island.”
Also producing are Encina’s own label Silencio Cine and Germany’s Black Forest Films, which backed “Eami.”
Encina’s father was an opposition lawyer. Born 1971, she was almost 18 when Stroessner was toppled. “Being Paraguayan and a woman, having lived a childhood and adolescence during a dictatorship with a father in the opposition, who was imprisoned, exiled and controlled for many years, are facts that have deeply marked my life,” Encina toldPvNew.
And her cinema too. Exile, loss, absence and the battle for memory, run through her first features: 2006’s “Paraguayan Hammock” has a couple waiting the return of their son, who left for his military service in the 1932-35 Chaco War.
Sparked by her reading of the so-called Archives of Terror, record by Strossner’s own police of their surveillance and torture of dissidents, “Memory Exercises” creates memories, most particularly of Agustin Goiború, a doctor who disappeared, as his wife and children recall his life. Eami is set against the forced displacement of the Ayoreo Totobiegosode, who lived in the Northern Paraguayan Chaco, by one of the most rampant deforestations in the world. Eami commits to memory the sights and sounds of the forest – caught in a shot of a dazzling thicket of foliage and a flock of bird in a lagoon – knowing she will have to leave her homeplace.
“The Unique Time” also has more immediate origins, Encina toldPvNew.
“In 2022, my brother passed away. Pain returned to my chest. Out of all the absences, this became the strongest, deepest and saddest one. He was 10 years younger than me,” she said.
“I started writing this film with something I can only describe as an ‘animal pain.’ During those months I asked myself again: How do I look at the world? What do I have to say? These are recurrent questions in my life. What I have to say is what happens to someone when they face an absence. And how?
“With what cinema offers me. Using times, using lights and shadows, using words, minimal gestures, with silence, always silence, with what has stopped but yet goes on, with what makes me be me. With meaning and sweetness.”
“Hopefully, with meaning and sweetness.”
