EAMI

By Paz ENCINA

OCHOYMEDIO - as FEST

Experimental - Completed 2022

The Asojá flies, the bird-god-woman who transmutes spirit. She was a tiger, she was a plant, she was a jaguar, and today she is a girl who must heal her pain.

Festivals
& Awards

Rotterdam IFF 2022
Tiger Awards Competition Tiger Award
    • Year of production
    • 2022
    • Genres
    • Experimental, Art - Culture, Documentary
    • Countries
    • PARAGUAY, ARGENTINA, USA, FRANCE, NETHERLANDS, GERMANY, MEXICO
    • Duration
    • 80 mn
    • Director(s)
    • Paz ENCINA
    • Synopsis
    • There has been an invasion. Eami lost her own kind, and so she started flying.
      The Asojá, the bird-god-woman of the native Ayoreo Totobiegosode culture, flies and brings the memories of the past, present and future. Today, the Asojá is Eami, a 5 year old girl whose name means Forest and World. She must leave her place while she wonders about death and the meaning of life.
      EAMI is the story of the Ayoreo Totobiegosode people, told from the trance of a girl caused by pain and healing. A trance granting the ability of an omniscient and timeless look, which, from the mixture between documentary and fiction, becomes the narrator of the story. In her path, she collects memories. 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 Asojá flies, and, as Eami, she flies through her territory one last time. 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 ever- smaller forest, to become “coñone”, an ayoreo word that means insensitive or insensate, and it’s the word they use to define us.