Witness of Another World

Juan Pérez is a gaucho of Guaraní descent in Argentina. What he says he saw in a field at the age of twelve made the news across South America in the seventies. His life changed from that day on: he was mocked, he kept away, and for forty years he lived almost alone on a farm. What he described shaped his life regardless of whether anyone believed him. Alan Stivelman's film does not try to prove whether the event happened; its subject is the weight Juan has carried for forty years. Jacques Vallée, the astrophysicist who examined the case years ago, appears in the film and talks with Juan again. The telling does not present a testimony as fact; it looks at what that testimony did to the life of the person living it. What comes out is a portrait, not a file of evidence.