40 ReVista SPRING 2015 TERRITORY GUARANI Guarani in Film Movies in Paraguayan Guarani, about and with Guaranis BY DAMIÁN CABRERA THE FIRST FILM SPOKEN IN GUARANI I EVER SAW was from the United States. It was the movie Jesus (1979), co-directed by Pe- ter Skyes and John Krish, dubbed into Guarani and customarily broadcast on television during Holy Week in Paraguay. My generation had not grown up seeing ourselves on the screen. With films like Hamaca Paraguaya (Paraguayan Ham- mock, 2006) by Paz Encina or 7 cajas (7 Boxes, 2012) by Juan Carlos Maneglia and Tana Schémbori respectively, films in Guarani are now achieving international projection as well as local popularity. To- day we Paraguayans can see ourselves on the screen and listen to ourselves— in our own languages. In Paraguay, speaking Guarani is charged with ambiguity: it evokes both fondness and contempt. In Spanish slang, the word guarango—the contemp- tuous nickname for those who speak Guarani—means “rude, vulgar.” It’s as if the use of the language were somehow a mark of vulgarity. However, at the same time, others celebrate “the sweet Guarani language” as the most important legacy of the Guarani culture to Paraguayan society. An indigenous language, from the linguistic family Tupí-Guaraní, Gua- rani is today spoken in Paraguay by the largely non-indigenous population. “The history of Paraguay is the history of the Guarani language,” says the anthro- pologist Bartolomeu Melià in his book Mundo Guaraní (Guarani World, 2011). The history of Paraguay is also one of pro- hibition of this language and the assumed exclusion that came from speaking it. But it is the history of persistence. In an emerging and increasingly pro- lific scene in Paraguayan film, Paraguayan Guarani is being heard at the interna- tional level, making visible its history. But does speaking Guarani mean being Gua- rani? Perhaps the new cinematic move- ment gives us the opportunity to reflect on these questions, both in terms of the status of the language and of the various types of belonging associated with Guara- ni: the indigenous world, the Paraguayan peasant and the urban dweller. GUARANI IN FILM ALSO HAS ITS HISTORY, AND NOT SUCH A RECENT ONE. “The first films in Guarani were silent,” observed actor and writer Manuel Cuen- ca, author of Historia del Audiovisual en Paraguay (A History of the Audiovisual in Paraguay) (2009), in which he details the country’s film production. Since the beginning of the 20th century, 35-mil- limeter movies—silent, in black and white—have depicted Paraguay’s indig- enous and peasant communities, with protagonists who sing or speak in Gua- rani. Codicia (1954), by Argentine direc- tor Catrano Catrani, was the first spoken fiction film to incorporate dialogues in Guarani. Basing his work on the Para- guayan novelist Augusto Roa Bastos, who also wrote his own adapted screenplays, Armando Bó produced La sed (1961) and El trueno entre las hojas (1975); in which, in addition to dialogues, one can also hear a song in Guarani, “Adiós Lucerito Alba” by Eladio Martínez. (Isabel Sarli’s nude scenes in this film made her famous, and she appeared again in India (1961) and La burrerita de Ypacaraí (1962), by Bó.) La sangre y la semilla (1959) was the first Paraguayan-Argentine co-production. Palestinian director Dominique Dubosc filmed his first works in Paraguay at the end of the 60s. Capturing the voices of his protagonists with a poetic tone, he depicts the life of a Paraguayan peasant family and that of the Santa Isabel lepers’ colony respectively in Cuarahy Ohechá (Le soleil l’a vu) (1968) and Manojhara (1969). Although several films are about Gua- rani or include them in the narrative, many have used other indigenous groups or even non-indigenous actors to repre- sent them. In his films that reference the Guaranis, Bó used Paraguay’s Maká tribe, which in reality form part of the Mataco linguistic group. In the first scenes of India, the lyrics of a song announce “india Guarani…,” with the Argentine actress Isabel Sarli depicted as an indigenous woman; paradoxically, it is not difficult to find in schoolbooks photographs of the indigenous Maká group with captions indicating that they are Guarani. Robert De Niro and Jeremy Irons were the principal actors in a story based on the original Jesuit missions in Paraguay, The Mission (1986), directed by Roland Joffe and with music by Ital- ian composer Ennio Morricone. In spite of my efforts, I could not recognize the “guarani” spoken by the indigenous actors in the movie and not even the words uttered by Irons. The Mission was not filmed in Paraguay: the scenes supposedly taking place in Asunción were filmed in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia; one of the film locations was at Iguaçu Falls in Brazil; the indigenous people are not Guarani; for the most part, they are indigenous Waunanas from the Colombian Pacific region of Chocó. But the gap is not as great as it seems: an Argentine indigenous leader, Asunción Ontiveros, plays a Guarani chieftain; in the accompanying expla- nation of the making of the film, enti- tled Omnibus: The Mission, Ontiveros spells out the common problems shared by the Waunanas and the Guarani, and indeed all the indigenous peoples of the Americas: the land. Although all fall under the umbrella of Guarani, there is actually more than one Guarani language; and although PHOTOS COURTESY OF DAMIÁN CABRERA