Screen can reveal the first trailer for Nothing But The Sun (Apenas El Sol), Arami Ullón’s Swiss-Paraguayan feature which will open this month’s International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) on November 18th.

The film will have its first screenings online, as cinemas in the Netherlands are closed until November 19 due to a two-week lockdown. If they reopen as planned, it will have physical screenings later in the festival.

The film follows Mateo Sobode Chiqueno, a Paraguayan man who has been recording stories, songs, and testimonies of his Ayoreo people on an old tape recorder since the 1970s. Facing the consequences of a violent uprooting and in an attempt to preserve fragments of a disappearing culture, Mateo walks across communities in the arid and desolate Paraguayan Chaco region.

UK-based Film Republic has international rights to Nothing But The Sun. It is produced by Pascal Trächslin for cineworx filmproduktion in Switzerland and Ullón for Arami Ullón Cine in Paraguay.

“Apenas el Sol is about irreparable loss, and not an ethnographic document,” said Ullón. ”I hope that through my cinema I can make a situation deliberately ignored by the authorities and the groups of power visible, and include it in the public debate.”

IDFA 2020 is scheduled to go ahead from November 18-December 6. The Netherlands entered a two-week lockdown on November 4; cinemas are scheduled to reopen on November 19.

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