Paz Encina’s Eami opens with a scene that feels yanked from a dream, then hangs in this otherworldly realm for the 83 minutes that follow. The scene is a static shot of what looks like a patch of swampland, four small eggs laying camouflaged a few inches from the water. It spans eight minutes, though the way light changes gives a sense of days and nights unfurling in a relentless loop as a girl’s lilting voice, drowned in a symphony of birds’ noises and howling winds, recounts how the Earth was born and humans came into being. The girl is the eponymous Eami (Anel Picanerai), and the film—Encina’s third feature, for which she won top prize at this year’s Rotterdam Film Festival—is born of and zeroes in on the indigenous community she hails from, the Ayoreo Totobiegosode, a people whom centuries of colonial violence and...
- 3/2/2022
- by Leonardo Goi
- The Film Stage
For the Ayoreo Totobiegosode people, the word “eami” means forest and world. Such twinned meaning speaks to the way this indigenous community understands the environment around them. The forest is their world. Or was. For now, the Paraguayan Chaco where the Ayoreo Totobiegosode live is the territory with the highest deforestation rate in the world. Such a statistic may not be explicitly spelled out in Paz Encina’s dreamlike feature “Eami,” but it nevertheless helps structure this fictionalized story of a 5-year-old girl called Eami (Anel Picanerai) who’s mourning the place she now must leave, like many in her family have been forced to do before. As a conduit for the history of her people, Eami conjures up other stories that make this poetic ode to the ongoing fight for the memory of the Ayoreo Totobiegosode.
From its very first image, “Eami” demands you immerse yourself in its sensory imagination.
From its very first image, “Eami” demands you immerse yourself in its sensory imagination.
- 2/5/2022
- by Manuel Betancourt
- Variety Film + TV
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