Embrace of the Serpent reimagines the relationship between Karamakate, an Amazonian shaman and last survivor of his people, and two scientists who work together over 40 years to search the Amazon for a sacred healing plant.
In Embrace of the Serpent, the German ethnographer Theodor Koch-Grunberg is upset when Amazonian boys steal his compass; these people navigate by the stars, he explains to his native guide, and may lose that ability.
Who are you to decide what knowledge they should or shouldn't have, the guide replies.
Alternating between Koch-Grunberg's travels on the Amazon in the 1920s and those of the American botanist Richard Evans Schultes 20 years later, Serpent is an intellectualized drama about the conundrums of contact.
The film, shot in black and white, finds its most compelling character in Karamakate, a lone shaman resisting rubber barons, missionaries and scientists, too, even as he helps first the German and then the American find a rare curative flower.
Nilbio Torres plays the young man while Antonio Bolivar plays the old; both performances have a remarkable air of authenticity about them.
Colombian filmmaker Ciro Guerra's reimagining of the lives of lost peoples is compelling, but, despite many languorous images of river and jungle, this remains a bookish examination of the themes.
Kate Taylor