The winner of Rotterdam’s Tiger Award melds magic realism, mythology, ecology and ethnography into an exquisite cine-poem.

The Ayoreo-Totobiegosode people have lived for centuries in the forests of the Gran Chaco, on the Río de la Plata basin where Paraguay, Bolivia and Argentina meet. In their language, eami means both ‘forest’ and ‘world’. However, their forest, their world, is being destroyed: Mennonite farmers, missionaries and cattle ranchers have brought disease, destruction and deforestation. Following a five-year-old girl named Eami – who embodies the bird-god-woman Asojá, and who, forced from her home, drifts through the forest while collecting the memories and stories of her tribe – we learn more about this people’s pain.

Director Paz Encina (Paraguayan Hammock, MIFF 2007) immersed herself in Ayoreo-Totobiegosode culture and history to make Eami, an audiovisual collage merging the imagery and soundscapes of the Gran Chaco with heartbreaking testimonies from the Ayoreo-Totobiegosode. Eami blurs boundaries: between fact and fiction, between past and present, between human and animal. The result is a stunningly immersive, dreamlike elegy for a people at risk of losing their entire world, and their hope for renewal.

“Urgent and haunting yet delicate and measured, Eami gives a voice to a people who have been without one for a long time.” – International Cinephile Society