Eami

Set in Paraguayan Chaco, Eami — a magic-realist film by Paraguayan director Paz Encina — is the story of the Ayoreo Totobiegosode people, told from the perspective of a young girl.

Eami is a young girl and member of the Ayoreo Totobiegosode community whose homeland is invaded by settlers intent on brutally corralling the Ayoreo and driving them out of their ancestral lands. Embodying Asojá, the bird-god-woman, Eami falls into trance in which she walks slowly and stunned through her beloved forest as she prepares to leave it forever.

The trance grants Eami the ability of an omniscient and timeless look, which, from the mixture between documentary and fiction, becomes the narrator of the story. She hears the voices of her grandparents, while she is joined by one of her animal friends, the lizard, who guides her. He knows that Eami must leave the forest. She must leave everything behind, and leave, so she doesn’t die there.

The film takes place in the Paraguayan Chaco, the territory with the highest deforestation rate in the world, where currently over 25,000 hectares of forest are cut down per month, or 841 hectares per day, or 35 hectares per hour. The forest barely lives on, and it does only due to a reservation that the Totobiegosode obtained by law. They call this place Chaidí, which means “Ancestral place”, or “the place where we have always been”, and it is currently part of the Natural and Cultural Heritage of the Ayoreo Totobiegosode.

Eami is a story of the displaced. It’s the memory of a people that had to leave its original place, that eversmaller forest, to become “coñone”, an ayoreo word that means insensitive or insensate, and it’s the word they use to define us.

The film will be introduced by Isabel Calderón Reyes, a PhD candidate in the Department of Romance Studies.

Eami screens as part of Cine Con Cultura 2024. Courtesy of MPM Premium.