From Francis Ford Coppola to Werner Herzog, maverick filmmakers have always been entranced by the madness of the jungle. Colombian director Ciro Guerra's Embrace of the Serpent doesn't shy away from the violence of Apocalypse Now or the delirium of Fitzcarraldo, but his trippy dive into the dark heart of his homeland is ultimately like nothing you've seen before.

In 1909, sick and scraggly Dutch explorer Theodor von Martius (Borgman star Jan Bijvoet) travels up the Amazon river in search of the rare yakruna leaf that can supposedly cure his illness. Although he's aided by a native companion who paddles him downstream, Von Martius knows that only one man can help him find what he's after: Karamakate (Nilbio Torres), a…

Movies I can't enjoy as an indigenous person list.

Alright here we go.

This is a film I don't want to write a review for, but feel that I need to.
When I made my list, "Movies that I can’t enjoy as an indigenous person."
I got asked a few times what I thought of this film "Embrace of the Serpent."

I had honestly avoided it for so long because the cover photo is a white man sitting in front of a group of indigenous people. That's a big turn off for me and I had certain doubts for the film.

Well now I have watched it, and unfortunately my doubts were well founded.

I will start off by saying…

We are taken through time and space during two hours in the heart of the Amazon, transported from our own world and immersed into a cultural viewpoint rarely seen or understood elsewhere. Ciro Guerra magically achieves that, viewing the West and its destructive tendencies through the eyes of a man who has seen his heritage corrupted by colonial invaders.

Basing the story on the journals of European explorers who visited unseen tribes in the 20th century, we move seamlessly between timelines, as two scientists seek the help of the same native man to lead them toward a rare and sacred plant. Karamakate is representative of the mysterious spirituality that appears to layer every tree, rock, animal and waterway around them.…

An anthropological expedition to the dark heart of the Amazon becomes a psychedelic odyssey in Ciro Guerra’s transcendental deconstruction of Western imperialism and myth-building. Thematic allusions to Aguirre, Wrath of God and Apocalypse Now notwithstanding, this formally ambitious fever dream is a true original. Colonialism and memory serve as the twin forces steadily erasing an entire cultural heritage on this slow-burn journey down the Amazon. It’s a film teemed with mystical symbolism. And its complex structure ends up being the key to deciphering its meaning. Punching a hole between its twin points in time, the film lays bare the destructive force of modern man on his environment. And as the movie approaches its ending, it finds something true and wise…

Movies based on real events ranked

All I know about this film is that it’s got the Russian Bureaucrat from Peaky Blinders in it, and that it’s based on a real event with something to do with the Amazon jungle. Looks really good tho.

Wow fuck me was this magnificent in every retrospect. 

i was always going to love this film, it has a small ass cast, only 2 of which are actual actors, it’s got outstanding cinematography, a really well written character study and it takes its time in letting everything breathe. 
Just brilliant filmmaking all in all right here.

At first i really was hesitant on the choice of this being filmed in black and white as i…

Embrace of the Serpent has a mystical quality, crafting a story of becoming one with nature and seeing the colours of the night sky which nobody else can. It is a film of lost knowledge, imagining the stories and ideas destroyed by colonialism. Embrace of the Serpent has two storylines, both following a journey by the same man. Through two timelines we see the destruction of the jungle and the people who live there. The film depicts sadism and cruelty, with boys whipped, a man missing an arm, and a violent cult created. Embrace of the Serpent examines history as a lived experience, centering an individual story over wider context. Though the film is quite clear in showing how rubber…

At the beginning I thought this was going to be a colonial apologist piece, and I was kind of disappointed from what I had heard. As the film went on, it turned into so much more than that. The cold monochromatic visuals and the dense Rainforest converge bringing forth a completely hypnotic trance, a trance that drew me away from the obvious deeper into the forrest of the mind. This is not a politically focused movie as it may seem at the surface, but rather an exploration of the convergence of culture and ideas on a more abstract non physical level. I think the way that this movie can be interpreted is primarily from the first scene, we are introduced…