Cuchillo de Palo / 108, ES 2010 colour 91 min.
dir:  Renate Costa
pro: Marta Andreu, Susana Benito, Estudi Playtime
sc: Renate Costa
ph: Carlos Vásquez
ed: Núria Esquerra, Carlos Garcia
cast: Miguel Auad Petunia, Renate Costa, Manuel Cuenca
dis: UMedia

It was winter. My father called us urgently. My uncle’s naked body had been found lying on the floor. A crowd had gathered at his corner. The police dispersed onlookers. My relatives were there. They asked me to go inside and choose the clothes in which he would be buried. I opened his wardrobe: It was empty. When I asked them what he died of they told me: “Of sadness”. That answer contradicted all my memories of his life. Rodolfo was the only one among my father’s brothers who didn’t want to be a blacksmith like my grandfather. In the Paraguay of the eighties, under Stroessner’s dictatorship, he wanted to be a dancer. This is the search for traces of his life and the discovery that he had been included in one of the “108 homosexual lists”, arrested and tortured. Still today in Paraguay when someone calls you “108″ they mean “faggot.” For more than one generation, the duration of Stroessner’s dictatorship, men who came under suspicion of being homosexual or against the regime were the favorite target of collaborators. Rodolfo’s story reveals a part of the hidden and silenced history of my country.

Film premiered at Berlinale Panorama in 2010.
Best Film of the Human Rights Competition at BAFICI 2010