Memory Exercises

Directed by Paz Encina

The culmination of Encina’s work with the so-called Archives of Terror—meticulous records kept by the government of dictator Alfredo Stroessner. Encina’s longstanding political and aesthetic research project focused on how a community can cope with such detailed accounts of human rights violations. Memory and history, the personal and the political interweave in this experimental documentary that explores the consequences of Stroessner’s decades-long state terror regime and how it continues to mark the Paraguayan people. Constructed from the testimonies, visual material, and memories of the children of Agustín Goiburú, an opposition leader who disappeared in 1979, the documentary is a provocative reflection on how film might respond to political circumstances amid a surfeit of images of terror.