EAMI is a lyrical tribute to an indigenous Paraguayan community under threat

• Reviewed from the 2022 International Film Festival Rotterdam   

Taking place in South America’s Gran Chaco, Paraguayan director Paz Encina’s new feature film EAMI slowly unfolds to reveal the suffering of the indigenous Ayoreo-Totobiegosode – their home is under threat from deforestation, at the fastest rate in the world.

In this peoples’ language ‘eami’ means both ‘forest’ and ‘world’, there is no distinction between the two because this habitat is where their whole life is contained and now their world is ending. But in Encina’s film, Eami also represents a young child, a narrator who gives the land itself a voice with which to mourn. Offering a hybrid of documentary and magic-realist fiction, the film has shades of Apichatpong Weerasethakul in its tethering of spirituality and death to nature but also in its hallucinatory atmosphere, its soft-spoken, poetic narration and leisurely-paced editing.

Like the films of Weerasethakul, EAMI is in part about finding history within one’s self and the natural world. Encina’s very deliberate use of lighting is masterful in evoking that connection, showing the Ayoreo-Totobiegosode’s attachment to their land through a simple observation of natural light slowly illuminating the soil in the film’s opening shot, accompanied by the sounds of local fauna gradually teeming with life. Through these subtle textural changes, EAMI’s visuals feel completely in tune with the cycle of birth and death – the latter emphasised by the threatening noise of heavy machinery and the ‘coñone’ (referring to the deforesters, literally meaning ‘the insensitive’).

With the arrival of these interlopers, the once peaceful scene is bathed in the ominous orange of vehicular taillights. We don’t see the coñones’ acts of destruction directly however – as in her film Paraguayan Hammock, Encina’s approach is often indirect, placing the camera at a distance. We hear the deforesters demean and round-up the Ayoreo off-screen, placing the audience in a kind of dissociative state.

No matter how it’s presented, the end result of the destruction of the land is essentially the destruction of each Ayoreo person – scenes of deforestation are frequently followed by scenes of shamanistic healing, which Encina films with almost anthropological observation. Though didactic messaging isn’t the focus here, there are documentary elements woven into the film’s lyricism as Encina uses a heartbreaking interview audio from her contact with the Ayoreo-Totobiegosode, detailing the depth of their loss.

EAMI is wholly concerned with the open wound in the Gran Chaco. It’s a film seeming in constantly search of a way to heal but can only bear witness to a people under threat of extinction. It’s a powerful indictment of the consumptive nature of the modern world, as colonialism continues to devour indigenous land.