The 2022 International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) has handed out its competition awards, with Paz Encina taking home the top prize. A press release has announced Encina’s “EAMI” was presented with the Tiger Award and €40,000 (about $45,000 USD).
A magical-realist tale, “EAMI’s” title comes from a word that means both “forest” and “world.” The pic, informed by Ayoreo-Totobiegosode mythology, sees young protagonist Eami wandering the Paraguayan rainforest as her community is being forced out due to deforestation.
Encina wrote and directed the film.
“We were unanimously affected by the powerful film created by the director and the team that succeeds in building a strong narrative that not only sustains itself visually, politically, and also poetically, putting the lights on the global massacres of indigenous tribes, through the cry of the Paraguayan Ayoreo-Totobiegosode,” the jury members said in their statement. “This film gave us the opportunity to dream and at the same time the chance to wake up.”
The documentary “Memory Exercises” and feature “Paraguayan Hammock” are among Encina’s past credits.
IFFR 2022’s other honorees include Morgane Dziurla-Petit, who received a Special Jury Award for “Excess Will Save Us,” her feature directorial debut. The hybrid project follows a filmmaker who returns to her hometown to look into a story about a terrorist threat — an investigation that leads her to her own family. “Excess Will Save Us” is an expansion of Dziurla-Petit’s 2019 short of the same name.
“This is a real debut film, unique in every possible way, full of ideas and crazy storytelling, proving that hybrid filmmaking can be hilarious and also reach audiences. It is a very generous film, bridging the gap between several worlds,” the jury described. “The beauty lies in the complexity of every character, their hopes and dreams, the situation of small individuals dealing with outside problems that seem too big for them to understand, and then their fantasy steps in. It is also the kind of film where the filmmaker and the making of the film plays a huge role and is intertwined with a scripted plot. The film is funny, extremely moving, and always original.”
IFFR will run through February 6.
