Film Commission Torino Piemonte

From an early age, the filmmaker Giuliano Occhipinti travelled across the plains of the Paraguayan Chaco, listening to family stories about the Italian colony of Trinacria and the Sicilian pioneers — including his great-grandfather — who left Italy at the end of the 19th century to “bring progress” to a distant land. At the age of eleven, the photographs taken by the Piedmontese painter Guido Boggiani of the settlers reinforced for many years a romantic vision of colonisation as a founding adventure. The move to Italy in 2013 marked a turning point. While researching in university archives, the filmmaker discovered another side of Boggiani: the author of the first photographs of the Chaco’s Indigenous peoples, the Ishir Tomaraho, who were entirely absent from Paraguayan school curricula. This revelation fractured the idealised image of the country and exposed the ambiguities of a colonial gaze, suspended between the desire for knowledge and cultural imposition. Boggiani’s violent death in 1902, and the burial of his camera by the community, take on a symbolic meaning that continues to question the very act of representation. In 2020, the filmmaker returned to the Chaco to film Indigenous communities, but the accidental loss of all the footage turned the project into a failed attempt. In 2023, he chose to begin again, returning to the Ishir-Tomaraho community with Nelson, a former community leader. From the confrontation between his own gaze and the silences of the community, the film takes shape as an investigation into the colonial legacy of the Paraguayan imaginary and into the ethical and political limits of filming the other today.