Paraná Ysyry (Río Paraná)
2019 · 10m · Paraguay
Directed by Delfor Mallorquín
Genres: crime, drama, thriller
Tones: contemplative, dark, melancholic
In the 1970s, two crewmen of a ship arriving at Puerto Presidente Franco meet a young woman working in a local brothel and end up making a tragic decision; memory, paranoia and karma will make them pay for what happened.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A guilt-haunted river noir about two men and a brothel—totally predictable setup that wants to be about karma and memory but lands in conventional noir territory; I'd rather watch something that actually *breaks* the crime-thriller skeleton instead of just dressing it up in melancholy.
Mallorquín's command of temporal layering—how paranoia and consequence accumulate across fragmented memory—positions this squarely in the Latin American noir tradition while refusing easy moral resolution; the restraint in not over-explaining the tragedy gives it real formal sophistication.
There's likely one moment—maybe a glance between the crewmen, or the sound design when memory fractures—where the whole emotional weight clicks into place, and that's the film; if Mallorquín nailed that single beat on a modest budget, it's everything.