Napa Sonoma Wine Country Film Festival 2008

Is the truth stranger than fiction or the other way around? In the summer of 1909, 18-year-old Giovanni Piras left his home in Mamoiada, a small village in Sardinia, to travel to Argentina to seek his fortune.

His letters home were infrequent and then, they broke off altogether after only a few years. His family did not give up the hope of re-establishing contact with Giovanni and then one Sunday in 1950‚ Giovanni's sister, Caterina, found him again. He was featured on the cover of a magazine as Juan Domingo Peron, President of Argentina.

While hard to believe that the legendary General Juan Peron, three times president of Argentina, was actually Giovanni Piras, a humble peasant from Sardinia, there is a theory about how this metamorphosis could have occurred and managed to stay hidden all these years.

Piras had to create for himself an Argentine birth in order to avoid the call to the arms for war 1915-18 from his native land and with the aid of powerful friends in Argentina, he changed his identity and undertook studies at the Colegio Militar, the National Military Academy, a right granted only to the Argentinean citizens.

Once he became the President, Piras/Peron could not let his secret be revealed, since a crime had been committed against the State, and to confess his true identity, meant he would lose his rank, his uniform and his power. The irony is that Peron exalted the concept of native land and spoke in many speeches of the concept of being “a true, genuine and faithful Argentinean.""

In Sardinia, this case has been debated for almost sixty years and rumors and mystery still surround the fate of Giovanni. What happened to the poor emigrant? And who really was the legendary Juan Domingo Peron?

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