Format/Structure

Feature-length documentary

Long Abstract

Paperland explores the role of legal documents in land conflicts and the politics of legal archives in Mapuche territory in southern Chile. The film traces the history of an accidental legal archive of land deeds dating back to the first military invasion of Wallmapu in the 1860s. This archive was saved from destruction during the Chilean military dictatorship (1973–1990) by local amateur historian and collector Hugo “Fito” Gallegos, who later made it publicly accessible through his local history museum in Angol (Museo Histórico de Angol Julio Abasolo Aldea). He died in 2022.

The documents contained in this archive potentially hold key evidence to substantiate land claims made by indigenous Mapuche communities as they confront the Chilean state in efforts to recover lands that have been taken over by pine and eucalyptus plantations. The archive concerns the province of Malleco, a region marked by persistent land conflicts since the 1990s and subject to a formal state of exception since 2019. Today, the archive exists under precarious conditions and continues to be the object of attacks, precisely because of its capacity to destabilize current land relations in the region.

The film asks: what agency do legal archives have, and to whom do public documents belong when the state itself has attempted to destroy them?

Paperland is an ethnographic documentary emerging from nearly a decade of sustained ethnographic engagement in the Malleco region. It is the result of a low-budget collaborative process involving anthropologist María Cariola, photographer Rodrigo Maldonado, and the Angol-based Frontera Sur production company.

Formally, the film combines interviews, observational filmmaking, and archival materials drawn from the personal networks of Hugo “Fito” Gallegos, historians, and Mapuche communities. It weaves together the history of the archive and its founder with the story of a Mapuche community, Mallekoche, whose contemporary land claims rely centrally on a document preserved within this archive.