22/11/2024 - Anna Recalde Miranda’s fifth documentary sounds the alarm bells for Latin America’s politics

At the beginning of Green Is the New Red [+see also:
interview: Anna Recalde Miranda
film profile], Italian-Paraguayan director Anna Recalde Miranda describes her fatherland (Paraguay) as a “reality that floats beyond time”. Following a brief exposé of the country’s political timeline between 2008 and 2012, it’s her voice that guides the film. As she narrates in Italian, the audience becomes swept up in a reality that seems painfully familiar to anyone who knows the modern history of Latin America. Following the anti-communist repression of the 1970s, the country has been scarred by unlawful land-grabbing, feudal laws and no fewer than 24 attempted coups. When the director mourns “the lost possibility of another world”, in her honest confession, we hear the tragic ring of a traumatic past. Green Is the New Red, part of IDFA’s International Competition, is committed to sounding the political alarm bells for Paraguay in the most suitable documentary form: a mix of testimonies and awareness-raising interviews.

It’s 2018, and Recalde Miranda has arrived in Asunción, conscious of the droughts and the worsening state of the land. As part of the Soya Republic (the cradle of global agribusiness), Paraguayan soil has been treated with chemicals to an unrecognisable degree. Green Is the New Red traces the common threads uniting anti-communist movements (such as Operation Condor) and today’s governmental suppression of land defenders. Armed with her camera and research, the director returns to a dear friend and the subject of her 2010 debut, The Land of No Evil, Martín Almada. Almada is an internationally recognised human rights activist who discovered the Archives of Terror: the last remnants of political opponents of the country’s right-wing dictatorship. As the camera lingers on files, yellow paper and faded photographs of people who were kidnapped, tortured and murdered, the close-ups are sincere enough to make your blood curdle.

With this comprehensive, insightful and uncompromising look at the many faces of political oppression and how economic interests fuel crimes against humanity and land, Recalde Miranda takes a stance. Not only is this film a form of archaeology digging into political violence, but its very particular facts and resolute statements about the role of the USA since Operation Condor make it a vital watch. Green Is the New Red balances its educational side with personal storytelling to hint at how humans are both the biggest asset and the most fragile element of any resistance movement. Martín Almada’s health is declining, and he is frank about having received death threats for decades; an outspoken US journalist who researches the Archives is reported dead – how can one pay tribute to their bravery, if not by continuing to dig?

Recalde Miranda is also brave enough to never sugar-coat the truth: behind the systematic persecutions of indigenous people and landless farmers who dare to claim land, one can easily recognise the ruthless machine of dictatorships and imperialism.

Less official than before, the criminalisation of Others persists. Recalde Miranda’s film, however, has the tools to expose, compare and diagnose the present, and to immortalise the fight for a possible (slightly) better world.

Green Is the New Red was produced by French company Lardux Films in co-production with Mammut Film (Italy), Tell Me Films (France), Picante (Paraguay) and Swedish outfit Sisyfos Film Production.