DISPATCH FROM OPEN DOORS
“We Are All the Forest” On Eami and Raíz by Ena Alvarado
Eami by Paz Encina Eami by Paz Encina
Luckily, Feliciano’s Quechua community has managed to hold onto the land of its ancestors – at least for now. Throughout the film, the mining company gradually acquires a more ominous presence, as it also falls back on more ruthless tactics of persuasion. The adults seem hyper-aware of this game, and they exhibit fear accordingly. Feliciano, on the other hand, walks near the company’s plant and barely bats an eyelid whenever he sees the henchmen on motorcycles. He has nothing to be afraid of, it appears, perhaps because he fails to understand the potential ramifications of their encroachment. A child’s looking, one could argue, carries a simplicity and vulnerability that adults cannot afford to offer. Both Eami and Raíz are inscribed in a rich cinematic tradition that has harnessed the singularity of childhood to reflect on some of society’s most intractable problems. Countless films, for example, have explored the ravages of war through the eyes of children: from Roberto Rossellini’s Germany, Year Zero (Germania anno zero, 1948) to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood (Ivanovo detstvo, 1962). Like Eami and Feliciano, other boys and girls on screen have captured experiences of loss or played roles as witnesses to atrocities – two, very different examples that come to mind being Carlos Saura’s Cría cuervos (1976) and Peter Weir’s Witness (1985) especially come to mind. Encina and García Becerra breathe new life into this genre through their respective subjects. Encina was only able to finalize her project after a full six years of contact with the Ayoreo Totobiegosode people. The film’s script and production process were the result, in her own words, of “crossing cultural barriers”. “For them, many things we do are absurd, like going to the restroom when the whole forest is at our disposal. Or having to repeat a scene,” she explained in an interview. Similarly, García Becerra’s protagonist had not only never participated in the shooting of a film – he had never even seen a camera before. This year’s Locarno Film Festival marks the final one in the Open Doors initiative’s three-year cycle focused on Latin America and the Caribbean. The choice of these two major films entirely devoid of Spanish and urban spaces – both frequently assumed to be constitutive of these regions – feels significant. Taking them as a microcosm, this gesture truly showcases the range of the 22 countries covered by the selection. Ultimately, as Irish novelist James Joyce once explained, “in the particular is contained the universal.” At one point in Eami, the little girl explains how she got her name, so pregnant with meaning for the Ayoreo Totobiegosode people. Her mom chose it for her, and the reason was simple: “We are all the forest and the world to someone.”
Raíz by Franco García Becerra
In the Ayoreo language, eami means both “forest” and “world”. In Encina’s film, Eami is also the name of a five-year-old girl who wanders the Gran Chaco all by herself. This vast expanse of hardwood trees and salty marshes stretches from eastern Bolivia through western Paraguay and Brazil, all the way to northern Argentina. It is home to South America’s second largest and most biodiverse forest, following the mighty Amazon. Though barely populated, the Ayoreo Totobiegosode – Eami’s people – have lived there for centuries, but over the last two decades, their ancestral lands have faced one of the highest deforestation rates in the world. It is no wonder, then, that the lush landscape Eami traverses is often punctured by leafless trunks and empty dirt tracts. In fact, what begins as a child’s wondrous excursion soon turns into a painful ceremony of farewell. Eami must journey through the forest in order to abandon it. “Remember everything,” an elderly narrator counsels her. “Once we leave, we can never come back.” The threat of a similar fate lurks in the background of García Becerra’s Raíz. Feliciano, an eight-year-old Quechua boy, spends his days herding alpacas in the foothills of Apu Ausangate, a mesmerizing, snow-capped mountain in the Andes. He plays with Rambo, his dog, and Ronaldo, his favorite alpaca, while listening to radio broadcasts of the Peruvian national football team’s qualifying matches for the World Cup. Back home in the village of Upis, however, his family and their neighbors are in trouble. A mining company, eager to expand its operations, has been pressuring them to sell their land. Its henchmen eventually resort to cruel intimidation, killing several alpacas and endangering the villagers, who live off selling wool. Whereas Raíz favors traditional, plot-driven storytelling, Eami embraces a fragmented narrative structure, mostly advanced by its on-and-off voice-overs. Yet both films share a crucial feature: each is centered on a solitary child’s perspective. Upon deeper reflection, this choice seems hardly incidental. Eami and Feliciano are born into a world already at high risk of disappearing, through no fault of their own. Across the Gran Chaco, Eami’s people have endured decades of displacement at the hands of prospective cattle farmers. The environmental decimation of the forest thus goes hand in hand with the banishment of the Ayoreo Totobiegosode, who have been its nomadic custodians for hundreds of years. As the last member of her tribe to leave, Eami bears the responsibility of safeguarding her loved one’s memories. This task is thrown into sharper relief because it falls on a little girl’s shoulders. Children tend to stand in for the future, yet in this case, Eami embodies the cruel foreclosure of hope.
Raíz by Franco García Becerra
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ales of environmental destruction have long haunted our collective imagination. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest known epic poem, the eponymous hero cuts down countless trees for lumber, turning a cedar forest into a wasteland. Soon after, the entire planet is engulfed in a deadly flood. The injuries humans inflict on nature, it would seem, often come at an unimaginable price. A handful of films in this year’s program of Open Doors Screenings give new meaning to this age-old conflict between humanity and the natural world. Eami (2022), Paraguayan director Paz Encina’s fourth feature, uses myth and testimony to commemorate an indigenous community’s intimate relationship with a forest under attack. The film premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) two years ago, where it won the prestigious Tiger Award. Though quite different in form, Peruvian director Franco García Becerra’s Raíz (2024) delves into similar territory, asking what possibilities remain when sacred habitats are menaced by extractive industrial pursuits. His tender and deeply felt film obtained this year’s Special Mention at the Berlinale’s Generation Kplus competitive section. Together, Eami and Raíz stand out for their fierce political clarity, despite a palpable absence of ideological heavy-handedness in either film. Perhaps most importantly, they offer a sense of urgency to the ongoing cycles of environmental devastation that plague our planet.
Ena Alvarado is a Venezuelan writer based in Berlin. A member of the Locarno77 Letterboxd Piazza Grande Jury, Alvarado’s work has appeared in Americas Quarterly, JSTOR Daily, and The Atlantic. She made her acting debut in Los capítulos perdidos (2024), which will screen at this year’s Locarno Open Doors.
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