El abrazo de la serpiente (Embrace of the Serpent)

Serpentine seductions, recoiled recollections, imposed civilization, the Amazon, stratus immemorial.

A German ethnologist (Jan Bijvoet as as Theodor Koch-Grunberg) falls ill in the jungle and only one man knows the plant that can cure him.

He's reluctant to help however due to the ways in which Europeans have invaded and ravaged his lands.

Indigenous knowledge, they hadn't created firearms or printing presses, but their wisest knew everything about the land, the creatures and plants and seasonal harmonies, symbiotic symmetries, psychoencyclopedic utility, what to use and what not to use, how to co-exist for millennia, neither stewards nor supplicants, living with nature as one.

From their point of view, European culture may have resembled a serpent, a massive anaconda, sanctimoniously suffocating their people, with intent monstrous gluttony.

From that of the European, the serpent may have been symbolized by the Amazon river itself, terrifyingly labyrinthine, spiritual yet unaware of the Christian God.

These inadequate reflections haunt Theodor and Karamakate's (Nilbio Torres and Antonio Bolivar) hostile interactions as a Christianized Indigenous person (Yauenkü Migue as Manduca) mediates, fully aware of rubber plantation horrors, with the scars on his back to prove it.

There's a powerful scene where a crippled Indigenous rubber labourer begs to die after he's discovered alone by them, their dialogue affecting divergent moralities, as acculturation marches on.

The three travel through the jungle in search of a sacred plant (yakruna) and Karamakate's lost people whom he thought were dead, encountering the destructive path of progress along the way.

Old and new worlds clash as they struggle to forge an understanding, another plot following their path decades later, as a young admirer of Koch-Grunberg's work enlists Karamakate's aid to find yakruna after having read Theodor's diaries.

Throughout this plot thread, Karamakate worries that he's become a chullachaqui, an empty shell, a void, as his memories slowly start to return.

El abrazo de la serpiente (Embrace of the Serpent) values environmental wisdom, culture, immersion, gradually heightening colonialist tensions, as they move closer and closer toward medicinal convalescence.

Progress itself is Ciro Guerra's unwilling target, as the dark side of rapid commercial expansion clashes with the remnants of holistic worlds.

A cautious pace lures you into the narrative and lets its unveilings speak for themselves, while mesmerizingly intuiting dreamlike fascination and cultivated dread, a wild consciousness, harnessed, revitalized, exclaimed.

What a world it must have been.

The moon and the sun coaxed interactive eternity.

Blessed embowered succulence.

Transcendent joyful sorrow.