Our take
This movie is gentle and utterly chaotic, intimate and massive, beautiful and ugly… it tries to be so many things and somehow pulls it off. It tells two stories parallel in time, based on the real-life diaries of two European scientists who traveled through the Amazon in the early and mid-twentieth century. Their stories are some of the only of accounts of Amazonian tribes in written history. The main character and guide in the movie is a shaman who met them both. At times delicate to the point of almost being able to feel the water, at times utterly apocalyptic and grand… to watch this movie is to take a journey through belief systems, through film… and to be brought along by cinematography that is at times unbelievably and absurdly beautiful. Meditative, violent, jarring, peaceful, luminous, ambitious, artful, heavy handed, graceful… it’s really an incredible film.
Streaming arrival
What it won
Oscars
1 nom
Cannes
1 win
Spirit Awards
1 nom
Sundance
1 win
The story
The epic story of the first contact, encounter, approach, betrayal and, eventually, life-transcending friendship, between Karamakate, an Amazonian shaman, last survivor of his people, and two scientists that, over the course of 40 years, travel through the Amazon in search of a sacred plant that can heal them. Inspired by the journals of the first explorers of the Colombian Amazon, Theodor Koch-Grunberg and Richard Evans Schultes.
Elsewhere
"An exquisitely rendered study of colonialism, memory and cultural erasure."
— Matthew Thrift
"It's another in a long, honorable line of films that chart the poisonous effects of colonialism on indigenous populations and their ecosystems, but with an unusually invigorating perspective, like a reverse-angle Heart of Darkness."
— David Edelstein
The details
