Embrace of the Serpent | |
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Theatrical poster
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Directed by | Ciro Guerra |
Produced by | Cristina Gallego |
Written by | Ciro Guerra Jacques Toulemonde Vidal |
Based on | Diaries of Theodor Koch-Grunberg and Richard Evans Schultes |
Starring |
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Music by | Nascuy Linares |
Cinematography | David Gallego |
Edited by | Etienne Boussac |
Production
companies |
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Distributed by | Diaphana Films |
Release date
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Running time
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125 minutes |
Country | Colombia Venezuela Argentina |
Language |
Cubeo Huitoto Ticuna Wanano Spanish Portuguese German Catalan Latin English |
Budget | $1.4 million |
Box office | $3.2 million |
Embrace of the Serpent (Spanish: El abrazo de la serpiente) is a 2015 internationally co-produced adventure drama film directed by Ciro Guerra and shot in black-and-white. The film won the Art Cinema Award in the Directors' Fortnight section at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival. It also won the Best Ibero-American Film at the 3rd Platino Awards and it was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 88th Academy Awards.
The film tells two stories thirty years apart, both featuring Karamakate, an Amazonian shaman and last survivor of his tribe. He travels with two scientists, firstly with German Theo von Martius in 1909 and American named Evan in 1940, to look for the rare yakruna, a (fictional) sacred plant.
Theo, an ethnographer from Tübingen who has already resided in the Amazon for several years, is very sick and is travelling by canoe with his field notes and a westernised local he saved from enslavement on a rubber plantation named Manduca. Karamakate prolongs his life, blasting white powder called "the sun's semen" (possibly a hallucinogenic made from virola) up his nose, but is reluctant to become involved with a westerner and refuses his money. Theo is searching for yakruna as the only cure for his disease and the three set off in the canoe to search for it.
Many years later an American botanist, Evan (Brionne Davis), paddles up to a much older Karamakate (Antonio Bolívar) who has apparently forgotten the customs of his own people. Evan says he is hoping to complete Theo's quest and Karamakate does assist, again reluctantly, saying his knowledge is spent. Evan has a book of Theo's final trek, which his aide sent back to Europe, as he did not survive the jungle. The book includes an image of Karamakate, which he refers to as his chullachaqui, a native term for hollow spirit. Karamakate agrees to help him only when Evan describes himself as someone who has devoted himself to plants, although Evan's real purpose is actually to secure disease-free rubber trees, since the United States's supplies of rubber from South East Asia had dwindled due to the Japanese wartime advance.