World premiering in this year’s Rotterdam Tiger Competition, Paraguayan filmmaker Paz Encina’s fourth feature “Eami” is a mythological tale born of the Ayoreo Totobiegosode, an indigenous community from the country’s northern regions. Unique in its form, the film blends Encina’s documentarian strengths that have garnered her international recognition and her interest in a highly poetic narrative storytelling.
Silencio Cine produced the film and MPM Premium sold it. The story centers on Eami, a child who imagines herself as a bird-god. She wanders through the forest in a trance and is constantly in contact with the harsh reality of deforestation, which is a very real and tangible threat to the Ayoreo Totobiegosode.
The film features a bevy of co-producers including France’s Eaux Vives Productions, Arte France and MPM Film; Mexico’s Splendor Omnia, Barraca Producciones, Piano and Grupo LVT; Germany’s Black Forest; Argentina’s Gaman Cine; Netherlands’ Revolver Amsterdam and Fortuna Films; and Danny Glover and Joslyn Barnes’ Louverture Films and Sagax in the U.S.
Intertwined with the arresting images that Encina finds in the Ayoreos’ rich yet contracting forest surroundings is the poetry of Eami’s voiceover and comments by older Ayoreos about the pain of their forced exile from their homeland.
Encina interweaves past, future, gods, a child and pain in a dreamlike experience that aims to enchant the viewer with its poetry as it sheds a sharp critique of the Ayoreo calling. “coñone,”This is a term that means “insensitive” in their language and refers only to white people.
Variety spoke with Encina on the occasion of her film’s Rotterdam premiere.
The film continues a theme that has been recurring throughout your filmography: memory. It is a concept that comes up over and over in Latin American cinema, as it addresses a past that feels lost and elusive. Would you be able to comment on this?
In 1971, Paraguay was a dictatorship. My family was against the establishment and witnessed everything that was going on. My understanding of time was also less linear because I learned music first before reading any other material. It was always possible for many people to live together. The theme of memory for me is both a structural and an organic part of my education. All of my films address the theme of loss, exile, and diaspora. It is, in a way, what I know and what I can talk about. It’s something I ask myself a lot, all the time. Who and why do I film? What is my purpose? What’s my position in the ever-growing world of images?
It is hard work to portray an indigenous community. How did you experience working with Ayoreo?
It was a hybrid process in a sense, because on the one hand I come from a country where I don’t have to go far to find an indigenous culture, because it is present in our daily lives. The indigenous language is the official language in my country. Guarani is part and parcel of our culture. We use it to communicate the most important messages. So I was always close to my family. We had an intercultural translator and a young leader in our community. Although it was an incredible experience, it was also extremely complex due to the fact that we had to deal with their differing time and space dimensions. Their language is not the same as ours. This means that their concept of time is different. That influenced the writing of this script. It was chaotic and a bit eclectic for me, but completely organic for them. We found our way together through the process.
It has a structure that gives it the appearance of a loose film. However, it is made through many formal decisions like long shots which require the highest precision in defining a cut. What was the process of editing the film?
I had the immense luck of working with Jordana Berg, the editor of Eduardo Coutinho’s films. It was like being in an editing school. I was just blown away by her process and she helped me immensely as I had written the movie and, as often happens, you get to the editing room and it’s not that movie anymore. I had filmed faces and interviews that I thought would be central and could become the conductive thread, but it didn’t work so we had to re-write the film, quite literally. There was a lot of subtracting, re-shaping, and editing. She was able to see through the film and identify the pearls, which was a huge spiritual contribution. It felt like we were on an inner journey together. It was amazing, but also very stormy. I felt often lost.
Films are incomplete without the text. The language is rich and vital. How was it like writing it? What did you learn from the Ayoreo’s language?
It was surprising to me that parents did not have much physical contact with their children. They never hugged or touched each other. Soon, I realized that it was because everything to them is given through their words. It’s a deep relation with the world through orality, language lies at the core and it structures an entire relationship. They don’t use our verbal conventions regarding time. They can speak simultaneously, and not wait for one to finish a sentence. It’s a different harmony altogether where the word is essential. The film can only follow the same logic structure, where there is no past or future, and it heavily relies on their words. The most touching moment was when a woman said to me: “For me this is love, what we are doing right now, the encounter with the word.”