Paraguayan Hammock

The film follows a single day, 14 June 1935, in a remote part of rural Paraguay. An elderly couple, Cándida and Ramón, sit beside a hammock waiting for three things: the rain, a break in the weather, and the return of their son, who went to the Chaco War. The camera hardly moves, the sound runs separately from the image, and the talk is always about what is not there: the dog that does not bark, the rain that does not fall, the letter that does not come. So the film does not merely describe waiting, it makes the viewer live through its duration. Paz Encina’s seventy eight minute Paraguayan film was shot in Spanish and Guarani. Georgina Genes plays Cándida and Ramón del Río plays Ramón. It was completed in 2006, was shown in Un Certain Regard at Cannes and won the FIPRESCI award.