Yrupẽ

Director Candela Sotos traces her great-uncle, Guillermo Fernández-Zúñiga, a pioneer of scientific cinema in Spain. In 1954, he made “The Flower of Irupé”, based on an ancient Guarani legend. The film is lost, surviving only in a few stills – fragile traces of an incomplete story. With patience, Sotos carefully tends a Yrupẽ flower as she reconstructs her great-uncle’s story, exploring letters, photographs, and conducting interviews to piece together a bigger narrative. As the plant blooms, the film unfolds into a poetic essay where politics and botany intertwine, family memory meets national archives, and light illuminates the corners of the past that remain in shadow.