Researchplan in English

Research treatment Documentary Radio Pa’i puku

It was nine years ago when I first came to Paraguay. I was visiting my father, who lived there in connection with his work. When he went into early retirement he decided to stay in the country he had come to love. He bought land in the isolated region of the Chaco and started an estancia. When he died a year and half later, my brother and I became the unlikely owners of a large stretch of land in Paraguay, with around 1000 cows. Well…

In that first year I traveled often to the Chaco together with my brother. In my father’s car, listening to his music on the stereo, we drove the seemingly straight line the transchaco highway makes from capital Asunción to the north.

Around the Mennonite colony Filadelfia the radio would pick up the signal again. So we would turn on our radio, having exhausted my father’s cd collection in the last five hours. The air was usually filled with German schlagers, but I remember one time we drove into Fildelfia and heard something else: “Juan Carlos Mendez, your shoes are ready. You can pick them up at Zappateria Battista”; “Santi Alvarez, your wife is in labor at the medical post in Fildelfia.”; “Maria Carmen Benitez is celebrating her fifteenth birthday on Sunday. Family and friends are invited.”

I didn’t know what to make of it. After some enquiries I realized that messages are read daily for the people in the Chaco. For lack of telephone lines or a mobile network, people use the public radio as a means of communication. Personal messages such as the ones mentioned above, but also messages concerning business. These are often in cryptic language: “To that of which we spoke, the answer is negative.” Messages from person to person are publicly aired on the radio in the hope that they reach the right person. Everyone in the Chaco listens to Radio Pa’i puku as if it were a soap opera. In a place where people live relatively far apart from each other, they keep in touch with the other Chaqueños through the ether.

The Chaco                                                           

The north of Paraguay, called the Chaco, is very sparsely populated. A region that makes up around sixty percent of the land holds only three percent of the population. There are a few Indian villages, a few Mennonite colonies and a lot of cattle farms, called estancias.

The farther north you are, the more you seem to have retreated from the populated world. A common way of naming a place is by the distance from the city: “He lives near kilometer 346”, which means he lives near the Transchaco highway, 346 kilometers north of Asunción. The paved road stops after Filadelfia, somewhere in the middle of the Chaco. The phone line also stops there.

The earth is pale, dusty and extremely hard. When it rains it turns into a slippery, muddy mess which makes the roads impassable. But it rains only during half the year. The rest of the year not a drop of rain falls. The vegetation of the Chaco can be seen as a symbol for the hard life there. The forest is thick with cactuses and prickly trees. They are armed with poisonous and razor sharp thorns.

Radio Pa’i puku                                   

In the middle of the Chaco, at kilometer 389 is a small community. Children go to school, the cows graze along the road and the laundry hangs to dry in the bright sun. In the middle is a tall radio mast. This is the community around the radio station Pa’i puku, which makes programs ‘in the heart of the Chaco’. Founded in 1997, the station aims at bettering the situation of the people in the Chaco. They offer information and education with a religious and idealistic background. They broadcast in the whole of the region, stretching from Boqueron, Villa Hayes to Alto Paraguay. They keep contact daily with estancia’s in the far corners of the region through short wave radio, for updates on the condition of the roads, the weather and also to pass on the personal messages to be read on the radio. 

The programming can be seen as a representation of the diversity of the Chaquenian civilization. The radio and what it serves for has everything to do the landscape and the people who live in it.

There are religious programs, programs for the indigenous people about their culture and heritage in their indigenous language and of course the daily program of the avisos, the messages from person to person.

As I have mentioned, the people who use the radio station are very diverse. Communication between parents and their children who are at boarding school in the Chaco, between employers and their employees at the estancias, between business partners closing a deal, between family members who live apart for work or other reasons. They are often messages of a practical nature – people making an appointment of when they will speak to each other or when they will arrive. But oftentimes the messages are more personal: from someone giving a party, someone who has become ill, to a child being born or someone who has died.

Structure                                   

My point of departure until now has been the radio station, as a sort of center of a web with lines going to the far reaches of the region. I hope to follow these lines into the wilderness, searching for the senders and receivers of the messages. A simple message may give way to a beautiful and touching story. I am looking for interesting characters who could give a glimpse of life in the Chaco and who possibly could symbolize the social relations of the region.

I am using this structure now, in the research phase of my project. I can imagine there are other, better forms of telling the stories of the people in the Chaco, which I hope to come to later in the process.

Important visual elements are the landscape and the enormous distances. De rough and armored trees and plants, the vast empty space, the endless dirt roads with hardly a curve or a bend. They hold the promise of telling the exceptional circumstances of life in the Chaco. The vegetation of the Chaco is exemplary for the life there, surviving the drought in hopes for a better future.

As the film is about a radio station, audio will also be an important narrative element. The birdsong of the waking world during sunrise, the hot silence during midday, but naturally also the voices and music of the radio broadcast into the air.

The emptiness and remoteness of the Chaco stands in contrast with life in the bustling city of Asuncion. The busses trailing with black smoke, the street vendors at busy crossings, the shiny air-conditioned shopping malls, the rare calm of the grounds of the country clubs, the lunch crowd at Lido Bar – these will hopefully serve as a meaningful backdrop for the contrast between the city and the countryside.