17/04/2025 - Clarisa Navas’ epic documentary charts the life of a resilient young boy as he grows up in an isolated Paraguayan town bordering Argentina

Ángel Stegmayer is an ordinary young boy getting by in Nanawa, Paraguay, a small town geographically and culturally close to north-eastern Argentina. Yet beyond these precise specifics, as director Clarisa Navas captures him in her Visions du Réel Grand Prize-winning documentary The Prince of Nanawa, we’re inclined to see Ángel as representing “every” boy, in any global location. Navas achieves this through the key cinematic variables of time and duration: across her film’s 212-minute length, we can pinpoint exact phases of a maturation and coming of age that feel oddly fixed and universal the world over, whatever the differences in race, class et al. While we risk essentialising by only mentioning “boys”, this actually appears to be Navas’s intention, as modern masculinity is clearly one of the film’s prime concerns.

Based in Buenos Aries, Navas first gained attention on the festival circuit with her 2020 Berlinale premiere One in a Thousand [+see also:
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Ángel is a great on-camera subject, with his wide-eyed features and ingenuous personality, but also – and there’s that word again – because of his ordinariness. Over the course of the three and a half hours, as we check in at least once annually from 2015-2024, suspense grows about what may eventually happen to him and whether particular details alighted upon in conversations with Navas will act as a foreshadowing to later events. Although we see him eagerly walk to school proudly wearing his little tie and blazer, he’s not an academic or studious kid, and pointed sequences after this show him working first in a hardware shop, and then on a variety of building sites, with lax standards on child labour prevalent in these parts.

Although Navas creditably doesn’t fall into common neorealist cinema tropes – whereby Ángel’s story could neatly follow a “street kid” or “street urchin” template – she is sensitised to the challenges and also the deterministic outcomes he’ll face. Petty crime and delinquency creep into his life as he crests into his teen years, and his bubbly mannerisms harden into a more hesitant moodiness; elaborate and sexually suggestive tattoos start dotting the physique he diligently hones at the gym. Yet as the years race on into the destabilising pandemic era, his sense of class identity will be challenged due to a family revelation, whilst his reactionary stances on gender roles face a sudden opportunity to be addressed.

If you were to criticise The Prince of Nanawa for its wayward sense of focus, Navas might agree with you; following Ángel with the hope that his day-to-day reality will generate unexpected incident and drama, she lets us into an artistic methodology centred on chance, relieving herself of the control that filmmakers (even in documentary) typically impose. Navas stands on a metaphorical ledge to capture a classic vision of the loss of innocence and the gaining of perspective – and somehow, it falls poetically into her hands.

The Prince of Nanawa is a co-production involving Argentina, Paraguay, Colombia and Germany, staged by Gentil Cine, Tekoha, Invasión Cine and Autentika Films.