Hacker Cinema
Embrace of the Serpent
El abrazo de la serpiente
2015 · Film · 125 min
Directed by Ciro Guerra
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.
3 positive1 neutralfrom 4 commenters
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4 comments on Hacker News
We literally do not know what we lost.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putumayo_genocide
When rubber industrialists wiped out the people living in the area, those that remained lost generational knowledge. Ethnobotanists like Shultes explored the Amazon afterwards.
There's even a movie made on the subject of exploring the Amazon for medicines with Sean Connery, Medicine Man. Also, the more recent Embrace of the Serpent.
It reminded me the movie Embrace of the Serpent.
> the film follows two journeys made thirty years apart by the indigenous shaman Karamakate in the Colombian Amazonian jungle, one with Theo, a German ethnographer, and the other with Evan, an American botanist, both of whom are searching for the rare plant yakruna. It was inspired by the travel diaries of Theodor Koch-Grünberg and Richard Evans Schultes, and dedicated to lost Amazonian cultures.
Highly recommend
Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace_of_the_Serpent
Trailer: https://youtu.be/4ff7TcnqHUc
Always happy to see Schultes mentioned.
I think it was Wade Davis that said if you were ever to find yourself lost amongst any Amazonian tribe that you could say Schultes' name and there was a high chance it would be recognised due to the number of cultures he contacted.
Embrace of the Serpent is a great film based around some of his exploits.
I also collect data, from the very high-brow critics in Cannes, and recently also Sundance for comparison.
https://cannes-rurban.rhcloud.com/
What is evident is that very often critics gather to champion objectively awful movies. Even for professional movie critics standards awful movies. Looks for example at the surprising success of this years "Carol" and "The Assassin" in Cannes and their disappointing acceptance in the real world. Well, "Carol" is one of those special needs cases, which still has some champions left over. And compare it to the exceptional Cannes movies this year: Dheepan, Umimachi Diary and Embrace of the Serpent. The critics didn't appreciate them and didn't see it coming. However the professional festival programmers and jury in the followup festivals saw it.
But the same happens almost every year. "ADIEU AU LANGAGE" (Godard) highest rated movie 2014, "HOLY MOTORS" (Leos Carax) 2012, "Le Havre" (Aki Kaurismaki) 2011, "FILM SOCIALISME" (Jean-Luc Godard) 2010. The jury votes are usually much better than the critics votes.
Comparing quality to quantity (advertising budget, imdb ratings) makes no sense at all.