Name: Narciso
Director: Marcelo Martinessi
Genre: Drama, Mystery, Crime, Thriller
Released: 2026-02-17T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 101 min
Cast: Diro Romero, Manuel Cuenca, Margarita Irún, Arturo Fleitas, Nahuel Pérez Biscayart

A radio singer comes home from Buenos Aires with rock and roll in his voice, and a military regime that runs Asunción on fear suddenly has to share the airwaves with desire. Men and women both want him. Then one morning his body is found tied to his bed, burned. Marcelo Martinessi’s Narciso is built on that death, and on what the state chose to do with it.

The stakes around the film are now larger than the film itself. Paraguay’s film academy has picked Narciso as the country’s candidate for the Academy Award for international feature, the second time a Martinessi picture has carried that flag, and the Spanish release it is about to open is the first commercial test of a campaign that runs on festival prizes, European coproduction money and very little Hollywood muscle.

The casting tells you what kind of film this wants to be. Martinessi gives the title role to Diro Romero and surrounds him with a Paraguayan ensemble, Manuel Cuenca, Margarita Irún and Arturo Fleitas among them, rather than importing a star to carry the export. The two outside names are guest turns: the Argentine actor Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, whose lead in the AIDS-activism drama 120 BPM made him a fixture of European art-house casting, plays the enigmatic Mister Wesson, and the Spanish actress Mona Martínez completes the circle. That is a coproduction’s signature, not a marketing gamble, and it keeps the story anchored in the city where it happened.

Martinessi’s first feature, Las herederas (The Heiresses), followed two women of Asunción’s old bourgeoisie selling off the furniture of a vanished fortune. It won two Silver Bears in Berlin and gave Paraguayan cinema a rare seat at the European table. Narciso looks backwards from that film’s genteel decline to the moment the rot set in. It is set in the early years of Alfredo Stroessner’s dictatorship, which lasted from 1954 to 1989 and ranks among the longest in twentieth-century Latin America, and it moves the director from the drawing room to the radio studio: from what a society hides to how it manufactures scandal on air.

The case behind it is one Paraguay spent decades avoiding. In 1959 the radio announcer Bernardo Aranda was found burned in his bed in Asunción. The authorities used the death to round up gay men, arresting and torturing them and publicising their names, in the episode still known in Paraguay as the case of the 108. Martinessi renames his protagonist and fictionalises the circle around him, but the architecture is intact: a popular voice, a corpse, and a government that found a crime more useful than a culprit. Edin Custo, reviewing for Eye for Film, described the result as a portrait of “media-fueled moral panic, of bodies turned into public evidence, of desire recoded as threat”.

Industrially, Narciso is a textbook case of how a small national cinema reaches the world now. Seven countries share the credits, Paraguay, Germany, Brazil, Spain, France, Portugal and Uruguay, with Asunción’s La Babosa Cine at the centre and partners including Pandora Film in Germany and BTeam Pictures in Spain. The project collected development awards at San Sebastián and at the Berlinale’s coproduction market years before cameras rolled. It premiered in Berlin’s Panorama, where the international critics’ federation FIPRESCI named it the section’s best film, and has just played San Sebastián’s Horizontes Latinos strand. Luxbox, the Paris sales agent, is now weighing American distributors and coordinating Academy strategy with a Los Angeles publicity firm, according to the producers’ account in the Paraguayan daily Última Hora.

None of that guarantees the film can carry the weight now placed on it. The Berlin reviews were admiring rather than unanimous. Erwan Desbois of the International Cinephile Society called it “visually gorgeous” and argued that the beauty serves a dramatic purpose, but Sara Clements of Next Best Picture wrote that “we learn frustratingly little about Narciso himself”, and found threads that “often feel like disconnected vignettes rather than a singular, driving force”. Even sympathetic critics flag the same opacity. That is a genuine risk for a film whose argument depends on the audience mourning a man the state erased. A fictional Aranda can indict the regime; it cannot tell us who the real one was. And an Oscar run without a confirmed American distributor is an uphill climb for a country that has never landed a nomination in the category.

Five performers sing around a Radio Capital microphone in Marcelo Martinessi film Narciso — The radio ensemble gathered around the Radio Capital microphone in *Narciso* (2026)

Romero plays Narciso, with Cuenca as Lulu, Irún as Goya, Fleitas as a character billed simply as Dracula, Pérez Biscayart as Mister Wesson and Martínez as Nenucha. Martinessi wrote, produced and edited the film, which was shot in Asunción and plays in Spanish and Guaraní. One of the stills released with it gathers five performers around a microphone stamped Radio Capital, one of them in white-face vampire make-up, and it states the film’s register as clearly as any synopsis: show business as cover story, costume as hiding place. Sebastián Peña Escobar produces for La Babosa Cine, the company’s third feature after Las herederas and Los últimos.

Narciso premiered at the Berlinale on 17 February and opened in Paraguayan cinemas on 9 April. It reaches Spanish screens on 2 October through BTeam Pictures, with dates in Madrid and Barcelona, and travels on to the Festival do Rio on 9 October. It runs just over an hour and forty minutes. No United States release has been confirmed. The read on its positioning is simple: Paraguay has sent its most credentialed film since Las herederas, and how far it goes now depends less on the film than on whether Luxbox can find it an American home before Academy voters start watching.