For one week, I joined 10 emerging film professionals from across Latin America as part of the Locarno Industry Academy Brazil, held during Olhar de Cinema - Curitiba International Film Festival.

Throughout the week, we worked alongside programmers, distributors, sales agents and exhibitors from across the international film ecosystem, including Berlinale selection committee member Jacqueline Nsiah, Creative Africa Lab founder Romeo Umulisa, international sales consultant Lidia Damatto, MUBI Latin America programmer Mariana Saramago and FICCI Head of Programming David Montenegro, among many others.

Coming from a country that is often left at the margins of the international film scene, taking part in this space offered a rare vantage point from which to gain perspective, question, compare and rethink the structures that shape the circulation of independent cinema at both regional and global levels.

Precisely because of my position, I was pleasantly surprised by the programme's emphasis on dialogue. Rather than offering a conventional overview of industry topics that might have felt detached from the realities of my own context, the Academy created a space where conversations between participants, tutors and guests became the centre of the experience. Those conversations moved seamlessly between Latin America, Europe and Africa, making it possible to identify shared challenges while acknowledging the particularities of each territory.

Through structured discussions, screenings, shared meals and conversations on the walk from the hotel to our home base at Cinema Passeio (a Curitiba staple) we reflected on how film professionals from the Global South navigate an industry still marked by structural inequalities, while imagining new ways of supporting independent cinema from our own diverse positions.

I have to admit, being the first participant from Paraguay to attend any edition of the Locarno Industry Academy came with a certain sense of responsibility. I often found myself introducing -and, in some ways, representing- a film industry that is still in the process of defining itself internationally. But, at the same time, it was an extraordinary honour and made the experience particularly meaningful.

Most importantly, it reaffirmed my commitment to building bridges between Paraguay and the wider international film community and strengthened my belief that emerging film industries like our own have an essential role to play in shaping the future of independent cinema, not despite their relative youth, but because of it. Free from many of the structures that have long defined the industry elsewhere, I believe we occupy a challenging, yet privileged position from which to imagine and put into practice new ways of making, circulating and thinking about cinema.