FILM: Embrace of the Serpent

Ciro Guerra’s dreamlike masterpiece follows two Western scientists, 40 years apart, who venture deep into the Amazon on a quest for a legendary healing plant, and appeal to the same shaman for guidance.

Shot on glorious 35mm film, it’s a stunning meditation on the destructive power of colonialism for both its perpetrators and its subjects. Guerra loosely based his story on the accounts of two real figures: German ethnobotanist Theodor Koch-Grünberg and the later American botanist Richard Evans Schultes, whose research into hallucinogens is reflected in the film’s psychedelic atmosphere.

Made with the agreement and collaboration of indigenous peoples in its Colombian Amazon locations, Embrace of the Serpent includes dialogue in the Ocaina language, whose speakers now number less than twenty. “They found it funny that only a few years ago people from abroad, priests and such, would insist that they not speak in their indigenous language”, said Guerra, “and now we—as filmmakers—wanted them to speak it”. The shaman in old age is played by Antonio Bolívar, one of the last of the Huitoto tribe, who spoke out against the exploitation of the Amazon at the film’s screening at Cannes. He died in 2020 of Coronavirus, which claimed a terrible toll on his region of Colombia.

A DARE screening in partnership with the University of Leeds.