Around Paradise

“In Paraguay you need to control everything and everybody,” says Erwin Annau – revealing more about himself than he probably realises. He, along with his wife Sylvia, is the founder of El Paraíso Verde (The Green Paradise), a gated community in Caazapá in southern Paraguay which offers a sort of haven for conspiracy theorists, right-wing extremists and anti-vaxxers, so long as they have enough money, of course.

Russian documentarian Yulia Lokshina, who has been living in Germany since 1999, takes an observational approach to life in the colony, while also offering the counterpoint perspective of a couple of local student pals, Yohana and Will, who are considering offering tours of their area and who articulate the local myths. This approach has the benefit of being immersive but there would be no shame in using a handful of intertitles to help orientate the viewer. It also means the film doesn’t offer the interrogative bite it might.

The Green Paradise is 14.23 sq km or, as we are helpfully informed, about seven times the size of Monaco. That’s a lot of space for the approximately 500 families living there, although the intention was to attract around 20,000 to the site. Given that many of those who live there appear to believe the CIA is tracking their every move, and possibly aliens to boot, Lokshina is to be commended for managing to get access for her camera, wielded attentively by Zeno Legner.

Crackpot colonialism has a long history in Central and South America. From the New Caledonia Darien scheme and the horrific Colonia Dignidad in Chile through to Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche (sister of the philosopher), who Lokshina’s film shows was not the only earlier settler to establish her own colony in Paraguay.

Among the residents of Green Paradise are a family who believe they are “Messengers of Light”, able to talk to the animals and remove alien devices from the body using the power of their minds, and a British birdwatcher who turns out to have a racist streak a mile wide. This sort of collective woo-woo belief system has a fascinating quality, although as talk of the local myths indicates, humans are suckers for a good story. Yohanna outlines the tale of Yasy Yateré, a blond-haired child who lured children away. While this highlights the human penchant for mythmaking, it also could be said to apply to The Green Paradise, which has tempted those from foreign shores with the promise of what amounts to blond living.

While Lokshina encourages this sort of mental connection to be forged, she is less successful at showing the local populace. We get a small insight via Yohana and Will, who are entertaining contributors, but there’s little more to indicate how these two very different communities function alongside each other on a day-to-day level. As with almost all stories of ‘paradise’, this one comes with its own built-in troubles, although again the observational style means the film stops short of being truly illuminating as we are left to intimate exactly what is happening. While the delusions of the rich hold a certain morbid fascination, a tighter edit with more background and interrogation would make for a more satisfying overall experience. Lokshina knows how to lure us in, but she gets so close to her subjects that it’s hard for us to see the bigger picture.

Reviewed on: 23 Mar 2026