Pastizales y Esteros de San Rafael
2019 · 13m · Paraguay
Directed by Guillermo Menéndez, Mily Corleone
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
This documentary explores Paraguay's San Rafael Reserve, the main remnant of the southern Atlantic Forest, with its grasslands, wetlands, and wide diversity of environments.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A straight-faced nature doc about a nature reserve—fine, but where's the angle? It's competent environmental filmmaking that doesn't seem interested in upending what environmental filmmaking can be.
Menéndez and Corleone situate themselves squarely in the observational documentary tradition, letting the Atlantic Forest's ecological layering unfold through patient editing and compositional restraint—the kind of structuralist approach that rewards slow attention and positions conservation film as an act of formal discipline.
The wetland-and-grassland framing is clean, but what really clicks is how they let the sound design carry the spatial geography—letting you hear the transition between environments before you see it—which on what I assume was a modest production budget becomes the decision that makes the reserve feel like a character rather than a backdrop.