108

“Of all my uncles, Rodolfo was the only one who didn’t want to be a blacksmith like my grandfather: He wanted to be a dancer,” says Renate Costa as she begins a search to trace her uncle’s life with her camera. Turns out Rodolfo was included in one of the ‘108 lists of homosexuals’ in the eighties in Paraguay, under Stroessner’s dictatorship. He was arrested and tortured. There are facts and rumors. There are neighbors who do not answer, family members who can still justify their actions with awkward silences; and there are gay friends who still would rather keep silent; self-censorship remains ingrained in today’s Paraguay. Where stories do not match, the director often chooses to remain silent. She knows full well that she too is implicated in the most oppressive era of her country’s history: there are so many things she did not think to ask her uncle when he was alive. An exploration of a sad life story cloaked in ambiguity, Renate Costa’s first feature documentary is an attempt to recognize the people who lived under the pressures of being persecuted and were labeled ‘abnormal’ by investigating those prejudices and silences that tend to scar families and countries for generations to come. –!f Istanbukl