Memory Exercises is a poetic mix of documentary and eulogy, commemorating the life and disappearance of Agustín Goiburú, one of the most radical and determined political opponents to the Stroessner regime. He disappeared in 1976 in the province of Entre Ríos, Argentina, where he was living in exile, near the Parana River that separates the two countries and plays a major role in Encina’s film. Shots that resemble still lives filmed in furnished but abandoned rooms combine with archival photos and recordings, so that the film acts as both a record of history and an intimate memoir of Goiburú’s family, using the memories of his children, refracted in turn through words and images of a still-younger generation. The juxtapositions of generations, of voices, and of facts and fictions conjure up indelible loss and implacable resistance combined with a sense of lives remembered and continuing.

This fictional short film contrasts the relative privilege of a young dissident under house arrest with the poverty of the soldier guarding him. Encina’s distinctive disjuncture of sound and image here draws evocatively on the white noise of radio interference and on the filmmaker’s research within Stroessner’s state police archives.