‘The Prince Of Nanawa’ review: Rich, rewarding doc follows a Paraguayan boy from adolescence to adulthood

Dir: Clarisa Navas. Argentina/Paraguay/Colombia/Germany. 2025. 212mins

This fascinating, immersive documentary by Argentinian director Clarisa Navas has its origins in a brief TV section she was filming in regards to the marginalization of native Guarani audio system on the border between Argentina and Paraguay. Throughout the shoot, whereas within the titular Paraguayan city, Navas and her crew got here throughout a precocious nine-year-old child known as Angel who insisted on being interviewed. They’d keep near him, on and off, till he grew to become a father at eighteen.

  Setting and themes cross-fertilise in fascinating methods

The result’s a cinematic bildungsroman of three and a half hours that took the Grand Jury Prize at Visions du Reel and has since gone on a world competition tour that features IDFA’s Better of Fest choice. In Amsterdam it’s screening in full; different festivals have chosen to schedule the movie in two elements of 100 and 112 minutes, making the most of a pure narrative caesura that comes when lockdown (and adolescence) briefly restrict entry to Angel. But audiences, broadcasters and programmers ought to hunt down the uninterrupted model. The Prince of Nanawa is a movie that invitations us to show off all different inputs and let ourselves get pulled right into a story that performs on within the thoughts lengthy after the top titles.

That probability starting, along with the only focus and the filmmakers’ continuous entry to Angel (pandemic however), distinguishes Navas’ decade-long montage from the late Michael Apted’s TV challenge Seven Up and its many imitators. The company with which the voluble elementary schoolkid initially throws himself within the digital camera’s path turns into one of many distinguishing options of a documentary during which he’s quickly given his personal digital camera to movie no matter he likes in between visits from the crew.

“I’m 9 years previous, however I’ve emotions”, is among the first utterances of a boy who, together with his blond hair and Tintin quiff, stands out like a unicorn in his Latino setting. Angel’s standing as a co-creator is acknowledged within the ultimate credit when he’s listed as one of many movie’s ‘Artistic Workforce’ alongside Navas and three different key manufacturing and crew figures.

It additionally helps that the setting and the themes of the movie cross-fertilise in fascinating methods. Nanawa is a small, scruffy Paraguayan city on the banks of the Pilcomayo River, which kinds the border between the landlocked South American republic and Argentina. That first assembly takes place on a bridge between the 2 nations that has turn out to be a retail bazaar; later, when the fifteen-year previous Angel is crossing his personal border into maturity and has discovered work transporting smuggled items – on foot, as that is the one protected approach throughout the river – that very same bridge is eerily empty.

Life within the easy home Angel shares together with his mom, aged father and little sister is clearly powerful, however they’re certainly not breadline-poor. Within the movie’s first half we watch a seemingly gifted baby – whose meditations on life and love make him appear a lot older – as he’s feted on his birthdays, takes half in a stiff, teacher-coached college present, and discovers romance. Footage shot by Angel himself – together with an interview together with his mom, whose quiet floor conceals deep currents – is signalled by a black body, whereas scenes shot by Navas and her crew over a number of visits fill the display screen.

However right here too, the borders blur. Angel is clearly fascinated by the entire course of of constructing a movie and changing into an actor in it. He turns into more and more connected to those guests who give him the eye he craves. Step by step, he turns the tables on the director and her DoP and inventive accomplice Lucas Olivares, plying them with questions, or directing Navas to run and leap when he grabs the digital camera and takes on her position. They turn out to be a part of the household, serving to to clear up after one of many many floods to which Nanawa is susceptible, and within the course of reveal some faults of their very own – together with a bent to form Angel’s opinions, particularly when, to their horror, he toys with the concept of changing into a cop.

The rapport will not be with out friction, particularly within the movie’s second half when an adolescent, acne-pocked Angel appears each to ask and resist these outsider-friends’ invasion of a world that’s changing into sophisticated – not simply by hormones, however by the crime and violence that bubbles not far below the floor. Within the montage of smartphone pictures that fill most of the pandemic years, Angel, who had beforehand gave the impression to be exploring gender borders, turns into a jock: figuring out, indulging in gangsta cliches, later taking on with a lady who refuses, at first, to be filmed.

Angel’s rediscovery of a a lot older, well-off and well-travelled brother in Argentina seems to be for some time as if it would present a neat emotional kicker to the movie’s darker ultimate half, however as a substitute it seems to be a purple herring. This exceptional documentary’s precise decision, is much richer – and, like life, extra open-ended.