Coming to the AFI FEST 2015: ‘Embrace of the Serpent’
By: Sydney Levine
Tags: Festivals, Colombia

From Latin America “Embrace of The Serpent” (“El Abrazo De La

Serpiente”) is a coproduction of Colombia, Venezuela and Argentina.

This is a favorite film

of mine and is the Colombian contender for Best Foreign Language Oscar

nomination by Colombia’s Ciro Guerra whose past film “The Wind Journeys” also captured

an existence far from our own reality.

This film and the Venezuelan contender “Gone with the River” by

Mario Crespo are the first shot in the Amazonian rainforest in over 30 years.

“Embrace of the Serpent” premiered in the

Directors’ Fortnight section of the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, where it was

awarded the top prize, the CIACE Art Cinema Award. It also screened at the TIFF

this September.

It signals a new trend in world cinema, the stories

of indigenous people from their particular points of view. While Sundance has been supporting Native

Cinema for many years, now world festivals are also featuring them in greater

numbers.

Both blistering and poetic, the ravages of

colonialism cast a dark shadow over the South American landscape. “Embrace Of The Serpent” is the third

feature by Ciro Guerra.

Filmed in stunning black-and-white, the film

centers on Karamakate, an Amazonian shaman and the last survivor of his people,

and the two scientists who, over the course of 40 years, build a friendship

with him.



The film was inspired by the real-life journals of

two explorers (Theodor Kock-Grünberg and Richard Evan Schultes) who traveled

through the Colombian Amazon during the last century in search of the sacred

and difficult-to-find psychedelic Yakruna plant.



The film screens at AFI on November 6 at 6:30 PM and on November 9 at 1:00 PM



AFI programmer Landon Zakheim describes the film

here:

The shaman Karamakate waits warily by the edge of

the river as a German explorer approaches. The stranger seeks the Yakuna, a

legendary rare flower that can cure the man of his mysterious sickness. Only

the shaman knows its location, hidden deep within the recesses of the Colombian

Amazon, but he is distrustful. It is white men who made him the last of his

tribe. But the explorer knows of others of his kind, and so a perilous bargain

is struck. Shifting between these events in 1909 and 40 years later, when an older

Karamakate brings another foreigner on the same journey through a ravaged jungle…

Ciro Guerra’s masterful use of monochromatic black-and-white, symbolic

landscapes, overwhelming soundscapes and haunting, elliptical editing blend

together to elevate ethnographic odyssey into a hypnotic and methodical work of

pure cinema.

It will be released stateside by Oscilloscope in

New York on Wednesday, February 17 and in Los Angeles on Friday, February 19,

with a national rollout to follow.

International Sales Agent

Films Boutique has sold to Natyls for Denmark, Diaphana for France,

Magyarhangya for Hungary, trigon-film for Switzerland.

Director: Ciro Guerra

Screenwriter: Ciro

Guerra, Jacques Toulemonde Vidal

Producer: Cristina

Gallego

Executive Producer:

Cristina Gallego, Raúl Bravo, Marcelo Céspedes, Horacio Mentasti, Esteban

Mentasti

Director of Photography:

David Gallego

Editor: Cristina Gallego,

Etienne Boussac

Production Designer: Angélica

Perea

Music: Nascuy Linares

Cast: Jan Bijvoet,

Brionne Davis, Nilbio Torres, Antonio Bolívar, Yauenkü Miguee

Colombia | Venezuela |

Argentina, 2015

122 min.

Feature

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Free tickets:

http://afi.com/afifest/freetickets.aspx