After a bevy of credits espousing all the production partners that made EAMI possible, the film opens with a prologue of sorts. Starting in black, the image slowly comes into focus and you eventually make out the eggs in the frame. What follows in the prologue felt reminiscent of the kinds of story exhibits that would not be out of place in places like a natural history museum. The frame stayed the same on the eggs, but the lighting, colour temperature, and sound design changed in concert with the narration and a wind effect to create a dynamic visual and show the passage of time.
EAMI while not completely a documentary (it has a mythological tale at its core), filmmaker Paz Encina shows her documentary sensibilities all over the film. This was most obvious to me in framing that didn’t necessarily centre the human subjects but the environment, allowing the humans to be distant in the frame or fragmented body parts. And long shots, often unmoving, so that you could really take in what was being said in the voiceovers. Many of the voiceovers give the impression of recollection from the displaced Ayoreo Totobiegosode people, again adding to the documentary aspect. I don’t know if they were real, but as she spent a long time interviewing the Ayoreo Totobiegosode people, they are probably authentic or are recreations of them.
A particular visual element Paz Encina was fond of employing that stood out to me, was filtering the lens through something, especially when filming people. Be it sheer cloth, reflective glass, smoke, or even leaves.
At its core, EAMI is about the deforestation in the Paraguayan Chaco and how it’s displaced many of the Ayoreo Totobiegosode. The human representation of their displacement is the coñones, which is an Ayoreo word that means insensitive or insensate. In this film, the coñones are represented by a white settler woman. She never leaves her house and has hired people (and keeps many dogs) to keep her place a fortress and, through force, round up the Ayoreo. All the while, she stays inside and eats oranges. On the other side of the narrative, is the mythic story where 5-year-old Eami (played by Anel Picanerai) is the human embodiment of Asojá, a bird-god (thus the prologue with the eggs). Eami is the embodiment of the past and present in the form of a child moving through what’s left of their world, their community.
A particular image that stuck out to me. It began as a weird editing choice as these plants populated the frame until they almost filled it, making it look like a bunch of images photoshopped in the frame. In a film that’s shot composition seemed very natural before this point, besides the prologue that was visually staged, almost an hour into the film this choice seemed to come out of nowhere. And yet, it was an image that stayed with me. Narratively it signaled an emotional turn for Eami, the loss of their friend, and now must leave the forest, like so many of the Ayoreo Totobiegosode people were forced to do.
EAMI premiered at the 51st International Film Festival Rotterdam in the Tiger selection.