Experimental
Pervivencias is a creative documentary that, through the found footage technique, aims to reflect on the power of images to contain and reproduce moments from our own lives and, in a way, bring them back to the present. To achieve this, materials from various audiovisual formats (Super 8, home video, slides, etc.) have been used, as well as equipment to reproduce these formats. Therefore, this documentary also seeks to highlight the gap that the disappearance of these devices, which allow us to access these images, can create with our immediate past, and the need to preserve these materials, which offer us a fairly clear vision of the daily lives of anonymous people not so long ago. Because of this theme and the factors through which it is expressed, the themes of love and death also underlie Pervivencias.
A Paraguayan filmmaker recovers the film made by a Frenchman in rural Paraguay in 1968, the one that had moved him in his adolescence, during Stroessner’s dictatorship. He embarks on an odyssey through France, Argentina and Paraguay with the intention to reunite the Frenchman with the Paraguayan peasant family, building a film of questions and searches, about the absent and the present, about the adventure of life and the mystery of cinema. Years later, the long dreamed of reunion takes place on a luminous day under the bright sun, as a love story about humanity and the power cinema exerts on the personal and the collective memory.
Carmen demands a little more attention from her husband, Ibón, but his work monopolizes her time so that they can barely meet together. Oscar, their son, tries to get his parents to listen to him, but they are always “on their own business”. Furthermore, Óscar has problems at school that he doesn't know how to solve, because he can't wait to tell them at home. He also demands more attention. One day Carmen discovers that Ibón has more reasons, not just work reasons, for seeing them so little. After confirming his suspicions, he decides to take drastic measures. Oscar now becomes the epicenter of his parents, who use him as a bargaining chip between their interests, but continue not to pay attention to the little one's demands. By the time they realize it, it will be too late. Until then, everyone will have done their own thing. Now, there is nothing to do.
In a city—evoking, without specificity, a city of the Roman Empire—the poem depicts a state of waiting: the arrival of the “Barbarians” has been announced, the emperor himself seems ready to submit to their authority, and every hypothesis about the future is possible. The city holds its breath in anticipation… But who, exactly, are these “Barbarians”? And what if they do not come?
