// Presented as part of January's New South American Cinema Series //
Arami Ullón / 2014, Visions du Reel, Locarno, Karlovy Vary / 92'
Arami is a Paraguayan filmmaker living in Switzerland with her partner Patrick. For as long as she can remember, her mother has been afflicted with Parkinson's; recently, however, her situation has deteriorated and her nurse Julia can no longer care for her. Arami thus returns home to confront a situation most everyone will experience: what to do with our parents when they are sick and old.
A delicate and powerful meditation on the bond between a mother and a daughter, and the power of catharsis in art, El Tiempo Nublado (Cloudy Times) premiered at Locarno, Karlovy Vary and Visions du Réel, where it won Best First Film. Arami Ullón's debut feature was the first Paraguayan film ever to be submitted for the Foreign Language Academy Award.
Trailer
Interview
In an exclusive interview with Filmatique, Arami Ullón discusses distance, forgiveness, how social-political realities and shape our lives and her next project.
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El Tiempo Nublado: The Ethics of Documentary Filmmaking as Activism
In an exclusive essay for Filmatique, Dr. Catherine Leen examines the ethics of documentary filmmaking the activist role El Tiempo Nublado (Cloudy Times) played in addressing Paraguay's broken senior-care system.
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Press
"Powerful, intimate and uncomfortably voyeuristic... the film's very existence is indeed a celebration of the relationship between [filmmaker] Arami and [her mother] Mirna"
- Jonathan Holland, Film Review, The Hollywood Reporter
"El tiempo nublado is a kind of psychotherapy achieved through images, which nevertheless has the incredibly admirable quality of never falling into the trap of navel-gazing, instead regaling us, in a very genuine way, with an unexpected and reinvigorating emotional universality, a collective catharsis that makes the film one of a kind, halfway between a documentary and an intimate portrait... It is a refined work of great depth that can’t help but draw us in"
- Girogia del Don, Locarno Review, Cineuropa
"A supremely personal film set in part in a distant land, El tiempo nublado still turns on an issue which will be instantly— and movingly familiar— to film viewers around the world... a very relevant and modern social dilemma that much of the modern world is facing, that of an ageing population"
- John Hopewell, Film Review, Variety
"With a sensitive approach, cameraman Ramon Gyger unveils a relationship filled with love, as well as unspoken and unresolved issues... The sense of guilt which torments the daughter shines through in the images; sometimes faintly and other times with full force. A thoughtful movie which examines the inner distress experienced by the daughter during the final steps of the mother's degenerative illness."
- Manuela Ruggeri, Film Profile, Visions du Réel
Gallery
