Embrace of the Serpent
Why we chose this film
For hundreds of years colonialists and missionaries brutalised indigenous peoples all over the world.
Their supposed aim was to civilise them.
What does it mean to be civilised?
To wear clothing and follow a certain set of rules?
The Cambridge Dictionary uses the following definition:
If a person or their behaviour is civilised, they are polite and behave in a calm and reasonable way.
It’s ironic that the very same people who sought to civilise the indigenous, behaved in the most savage way imaginable.
Today while we are facing historic challenges such as climate change or wildlife extinction, we come to recognise that the indigenous peoples found ways to coexist with nature.
Their sacred knowledge and wisdom that colonialists aimed to eradicate, allowed them to live in symbiosis with their environment.
Looking at our way of life in the so called civilised world, we might want to ask ourselves how civilised we really are.
Film Summary
"Embrace of the Serpent" is a drama about the effect of European colonialism on the Amazon.
Mixing fact and fiction in fable-like fashion, Ciro Guerra’s third feature offers both a bold indictment of colonial imperialism and a powerful celebration of disappearing cultures.
Although fictional, the screenplay draws on the journals of two real-life explorers: German ethnobotanist Theodor Koch-Grünberg and American botanist Richard Evans Schultes. Versions of both figures appear in the bifurcated narrative, which intertwines two tales of white explorers, separated by decades, venturing into the Colombian Amazon. Théodor von Martius, a Herzogian figure in search of the healing yakruna plant, which may cure him of a fatal illness. Evans, a man who does not dream, and who hopes that the same plant may somehow heal his ailing soul.