Im Umkreis des Paradieses

What matters most in Yulia Lokshina’s films is the way ideology comes to shape experience. Here she turns her attention to a recently established community of Austrians and Germans in Caazapá, a town little known outside Paraguay. Called “El Paraíso verde,” the community brings together people who share a peculiar set of convictions: they reject vaccines, equate Satanism and paedophilia with globalists and those who advocate gender plurality, and believe that Muslims are gradually taking over Europe and that a Third World War is imminent. Their uninhibited 70-year-old founder Erwin Annau, a financier who plays the guitar and does yoga, is seen going about his daily business, as are its other members, some of whom practice spiritual healing at a distance. Local inhabitants also figure in the film, and several of them seem to be caught up in fantasies of their own. Lokshina’s manner is respectful, but hardly neutral. Her evocation of the reactionary nineteenth-century community founded in Paraguay by Friedrich Nietzsche’s sister points towards a critical recurrence: the old alliance between esotericism and reactionary thought reappears here in fresh garb. There is a colonial undertow here too that the film does not allow us to overlook. (Roger Koza)

In the presence of Yulia Lokshina and Isabelle Bertolone (Producer).

Yulia Lokshina: TAGE DER JUGEND (2016, K), AFTER WAR (2017, K), SUBJECTIVE HILL (2019, K, KO-REGIE), REGELN AM BAND, BEI HOHER GESCHWINDIGKEIT (2020), ACTIVE VOCABULARY (2025), HOW DO YOU SPELL THIS WORD? (2026, K)