Synopsis
Embrace of the Serpent (El abrazo de la serpiente, 2015), Ciro Guerra's Amazonian drama, is available to watch online on iFILM. Shot in stark black and white, it follows a lone shaman who, twice across forty years, guides outsiders deep into the rainforest toward a rare sacred plant.
Karamakate is the last of his people, carrying the knowledge of the jungle's medicine with no one left to pass it to. In two interwoven timelines, two ailing white scientists — a German ethnographer and, decades later, an American botanist — come asking him to find the healing yakruna flower. He agrees to lead them, but the river carries everyone past gutted rubber plantations, a deranged jungle mission and the scars colonizers left behind. Nilbio Torres and Antonio Bolívar play the shaman young and old.
The script grew out of the field journals kept by real explorers of the Colombian Amazon, Theodor Koch-Grunberg and Richard Evans Schultes, yet the film plays more like a fever dream than a record. It was the first Colombian title ever shortlisted in the foreign-language race at the Oscars. Slow, hypnotic and heavy, it rewards viewers ready to sit with questions about memory and loss. Stream Embrace of the Serpent (2015) online on iFILM.
Comments 0