Coming to NYC’s Maysles Cinema for a one-week run beginning tonight, Monday, March 18: 108 (CUCHILLO DE PALO)
Renate Costa Perdomo’s personal investigation into Paraguay’s history of homosexual repression made its world premiere at Berlin in 2010. It has played extensively on the fest circuit, claiming awards at BAFICI, Guadalajara, Krakow, Docslisboa, Havana, and RIDM, among others.
Costa’s starting point is the mysterious death of her uncle, Rodolfo, fifteen years earlier. In the course of making sense of his passing by interviewing her father, Rodolfo’s brother, and friends and neighbors, Costa learns of the aspects of his life that were not discussed by her family, and, in fact, were indicative of a larger societal elision. Rodolfo had an alter ego, a secret gay life, under a dictatorship that severely punished such deviations from societal norms. Alfredo Stroessner’s regime, in fact, developed a blacklist outing the titular number of gay men, a number that as a result has become a derogatory term – one matched by the second part of the film’s title, translated as “wooden knife,” an implication of uselessness and lack of manly power. As Costa angrily confronts her father about his knowledge of his brother’s suffering, he retreats into religion and passes the buck, making for simultaneously provocative and frustrating scenes. Given her familial connection to her topic, Costa oscillates between the journalistic and the indulgently personal, and suggests that there’s something more unexpected to her findings than there actually is – Rodolfo’s story is, sadly, not particularly surprising, even if the specificity of Paraguay’s repression may be unfamiliar to viewers. However, for Costa, there’s a sense of genuine revelation, which ultimately makes the film work – but more on a personal level than as a work of investigative documentary filmmaking.
what (not) to doc 