Embrace of the Serpent

Only one writer around here has managed to see Embrace of the Serpent, but such was their enthusiasm that the personal tallying — #3, to be exact — broke onto our top 50 of the year. The good news is that you need not wait long until it becomes available: Oscilloscope will release Ciro Guerra‘s film, itself Colombia’s Oscar Best Foreign Language Film Oscar entry, next month, and a preview has been released ahead of that.

Said Giovanni Marchini Camia in his write-up, “I have a weakness for heart-of-darkness films and Embrace of the Serpent ranks amongst the best (and most gorgeous) I’ve seen. It’s also the only one I can think of that successfully adopts a native perspective in charting the white man’s journey down the river, thus offering a moving elegy to the myriad cultures that were destroyed in the process instead of just probing into humanity’s vilest instincts.”

Have a look at the U.S. preview and poster:

embrace of the serpent

Synopsis:

The ravages of colonialism cast a dark shadow over the South American landscape in “Embrace Of The Serpent,” the first film shot in the Amazonian rainforest in over 30 years. Filmed in stunning black-and-white, the film centers on Karamakate (portrayed in various stages by Nilbio Torres and Antonio Bolívar Salvado), an Amazonian shaman and the last survivor of his people, and the two scientists (Evans and Theo, portrayed by Brionne Davis and Jan Bijvoet) 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 Evans Schultes) who traveled through the Colombian Amazon during the last century in search of the sacred and difficult-to-find psychedelic Yakruna plant.

Embrace of the Serpent opens on February 17th.

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