Paraguayan filmmaker Paz Encina’s “Eami” – being sold by MPM Premium – has won the top Tiger Award and a €40,000 cash prize at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), the festival announced Wednesday. The 51st edition of the Dutch event, forced online due to the Omicron wave, will wrap on Sunday.
The jury, made up of Zsuzsi Bankuti, Gust Van den Berghe, Tatiana Leite, Thekla Reuten and Farid Tabarki, was impressed with her complex, magical realist take on the suffering of the indigenous tribes, calling it a “powerful film.” “It gave us the opportunity to dream and, at the same time, a chance to wake up,” they stated.
Inspired by the stories of the Ayoreo-Totobiegosode people, as well as their mythology, Encina created a tale about a young girl who embarks on a journey after her village is destroyed.
“All my films deal with an issue of exile, of the diaspora, of loss. In a sense it is what I know, and therefore what I can talk about,” she told Variety during the festival.
“It’s something I ask myself a lot, all the time. Why do I film and for whom do I film? What do I feel I have to do? What is my gaze and my place in the world of images that is ever more prolific?”
No stranger to Rotterdam, Encina previously presented “Hamaca Paraguaya” and her short “Viento sur” at the festival.
