Paz Encina
Paraguay, Netherlands | 2022 | 84 min
International Premiere
Subtitles : English, French
Paz Encina continues her work of remembrance with an intimate and sensorial approach to the recent history of Paraguay. Eami is a fragmented work, an immersive and hypnotic experience in which the mysticism of nature and its soundscape is interwoven with the perspective of a child—witness to an indigenous community’s expulsion from the Chaco region in a territory threatened by deforestation.
Paz Encina is undoubtedly one of the most singular and coherent voices in contemporary Latin American filmmaking; here she continues her personal effort of remembrance with a new intimate and sensorial approach to the recent history of Paraguay, a gesture already begun in 2006 with Hamaca paraguaya. As in her second film Memory Exercises (2016), the director places her work within a sonic landscape; first and foremost, Eami is a work emerging from the broken voices of endangered nature and language. A fragmented account in which myth and memory intersect, Eami is also the perspective of a child, witness to an indigenous community’s expulsion from the Chaco region in an environment threatened by deforestation. Tinged with the painful memory of a territory, this humanist perspective does not dispense with dreamlike abstraction as it plunges the viewer into the heart of the forest’s sounds, in an immersive and hypnotic experience. Testament to an extreme environmental crisis, Eami is at once a cry for survival and a journey towards childhood, a radical cinematographical gesture which won the Tiger Award at the Rotterdam Film Festival this year.
Javier Martín
Memory Exercises, 2016
Paraguayan Hammock, 2005