Patrícia Ferreira Pará Yxapy, a young leader and filmmaker, has been recognised for her documentaries about her people, the Guarani Mbya. She was invited to debate her work at one of the world’s largest ethnographic film festivals, the Margaret Mead Film Festival, held at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. There, Pará Yxapy witnessed exhibitions that made her criticise the forms of representation of the indigenous people presented in the museal discourse. In this sense, the Guarani filmmaker’s speeches offer a ‘reverse anthropology’ insofar as they deconstruct and reveal the ways in which the Other is being elaborated in colonial narratives. When faced with the supposed grandiosity of the North American metropolis, Pará Yxapy reflects on the ‘juruá’ people’s world, contrasting it with the Guarani’s modes of existence: ‘New York is just another city’.
Key Words indigenous filmmaking, difficult heritage, Guarani, film festival, colonialism