In Caazapá in Paraguay, German doomsday preppers have settled in a gated community with the intent of building an ideal, self-sufficient society. El Paraíso Verde (The Green Paradise) is based on conspiracy theories about aliens, government surveillance and fears of immigrants, resource scarcity, vaccines and queer people. It’s not the first colonialist dream of a warped utopia in Paraguay: at the end of the nineteenth century, not far north of Caazapá, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, the sister of philosopher Fredrich Nietzsche and a fervent nationalist, had tried unsuccessfully, amid mounting debts, to establish a colony intended as a better Germany along with her husband, who ended up committing suicide there. Life inside El Paraíso Verde, as the community fractures amid accusations of fraud, is explored in Around Paradise, which screens at the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival in Greece after its world premiere at the Berlinale. The unsettling film illuminates a kind of thinking that has surged back with a vengeance in Europe and beyond since the COVID-19 pandemic, as escalating global insecurity fuels radical bids for a new order in places far removed from governmental oversight.
Preppers
The director Yulia Lokshina, who was born in Moscow but studied in Germany, is clearly concerned with how power justifies itself, seeds its ideas, and exerts control. Her previous film, Active Vocabulary (2025), involved a re-enactment in a German classroom of a teacher’s denunciation by a pupil in Russia for criticising the invasion of Ukraine. In Around Paradise, she has gained sufficient trust with the founders of the community, Erwin and Sylvia, and their children, for us to be brought into their home as they discuss what they all regard as their daily work: talking to animals, and removing the black magic attacks and alien transmitters they are sure alter human perception. This openness to expounding on their ideas is perhaps not so surprising, given that they are part of a rampant online industry that wedges alternative wellness with fringe political theories, peddling the notion in streamed seminars that the diagnosis of cancer and other diseases is all in the mind, and the human body can potentially live forever. The casual, assured manner in which they detail their outlandish worldview, which can metastasise unchallenged in this bubble cut off from the world, is alarming to the scientifically minded.
The unsettling film illuminates a kind of thinking that has surged back with a vengeance in Europe and beyond since the COVID-19 pandemic
Myths and legends
The local citizens of Paraguay are regarded as a mere afterthought or inconvenience by this German settler community, with all the disdain that imperialist prejudice can muster. Lokshina takes care not to dismiss them in the same way, counterbalancing scenes inside the houses of El Paraíso Verde with time spent with Will and Yohana, two students trying to earn an income and build a future for themselves in this poor region with limited options. They are researching attractions which might support business for them as tourist guides, and the strange legends that have flourished there during centuries of colonialism since the city’s founding by a Franciscan friar and missionary evangelist, Luis de Bolaños, feed no shortage of striking stories, including the underground tunnels he was rumoured to have used. One Guarani myth is given particular prominence in the film: that of Yasy Yateré, a forest-dwelling being who looks like a blond child whose paleness resembles moonshine and who can transform into a cuckoo to get closer to children and enthral them. It’s a myth that the Nazis who came to Paraguay in the 1930s, where the Party had a foothold, were also obsessed with birdwatching and hunting.
All about the money
There may be no monopoly on strange belief systems here, in a film which appreciates that magic and mythmaking are intrinsic to the human condition, but while Lokshina prefers to observe and let us draw our own conclusions from the barrage of tales and claims, rather than spell out her own position with didacticism, she does not encourage us to conclude that quackery is simply a matter of perspective. The real-world harms of colonies such as El Paraíso Verde are largely left implicit, but its status as a failing sham preying parasitically on the honest is apparent in the internal collapse of its cohesion as newcomer settlers lose vast amounts of money with no sign of the promised returns, and their anguished accusations of fraud against Erwin and Sylvia fall on deaf ears. At the end of the day, it’s all cynically about the money for the founders, it appears, as they dupe rather than nurture their followers, whose savings fund the family’s comfortable existence close to Latin American nature and far from regulators’ eyes.
