Rotterdam Tiger Competition Entry ‘Eami’ Gets a First Look Trailer (EXCLUSIVE)

variety.com:

John Hopewell Chief International CorrespondentParis-based sales agent MPM Premium has shared with Variety a first trailer for “Eami,” a striking ecological fable and tale of the pain of exile which will world premiere in main competition at the 2022 Rotterdam Festival.Brought onto the market at Ventana Sur, “Eami” marks the fourth feature, and second narrative movie, from Paz Encina, Paraguay’s most prominent auteur whose 2005 debut, “Hamaca Paraguaya,” about an old couple awaiting their son’s return from the 1932-35 Chaco War, opened Cannes Critics’ Week, winning the Intl.

Federation of Film Critics Fipresci Award for best film in that section.The background to “Eami” is the forced displacement of the Ayoreo Totobiegosode, who lived in the Northern Paraguayan Chaco, by one of the most rampant deforestations in the world, as companies coveted their land for stockbreeding.

But Encina, as in her 2016 doc feature “Memory Exercises” and last year’s “Varaderos,” is interested less in fact-laden exposition of history as its intimate experience.

It’s the engrossment in the imagination of an exiled people, filtered through the anguish of Eami, aged 5, which sets Encina’s Rotterdam contender apart.This full immersion in the worldview mindset, forest and tragedy of Eami is caught by the trailer.It is bookended by fantasmal blood-red scenes of a forest fire, a voice shouting “coñones,” an Ayoreo word means insensitive or insensate, the name they use to define outsiders.Embodying Asojá, a bird-god-woman, Eami is cared for by an older member of the tribe. “Heal your soul of the evil of the coñone,” he says.