Inspired by the travel diaries of Theodor Koch Grunberg (1879–1924) and Richard Evans Schultes (1915-2001), who provided two of the earliest accounts of Amazonian cultures, Ciro Guerra’s Embrace of the Serpent (2015) remains one of the most potent works of recent world cinema. A story told through the eyes of a warrior shaman of the search into the heart of the Colombian Amazon for the mythical Yakruna plant, the film bears witness how colonialism, religion and the exploitation of rubber affects indigenous traditions and the environment to which they are inextricably linked. So, the stakes were high for Guerra’s next project. Co-directing with Embrace of the Serpent producer Cristina Gallego, the film doesn’t disappoint.“Told in an intimate, personal way. Our own way,”1 Birds of Passage is another formidable meditation on the corrupting forces of wealth and power, set against the backdrop of the marijuana boom of the 1970s.
- 2/16/2019
- MUBI
Colombian auteur Ciro Guerra's latest film, Embrace of the Serpent, first screened in the Director's Fortnight section at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival (where it won the Cicae Award) and is the first Colombian film to be nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards. It recounts, through a mixture of fact and fiction, the transformational journeys of real-life explorers Theo Koch- Grünberg and Richard Evans Schultes through the Amazon rainforest, while taking the audience on an equally profound spiritual voyage. Maximilian Von Thun sat down with Guerra ahead of the UK release of the film, which is in cinemas and on demand this Friday.
Maximilian Von Thun: Embrace of the Serpent is a record of people who are extinct or who soon will be. Do you have any optimism that this process can be reversed, or is this a farewell to them?
Ciro Guerra: The main...
Maximilian Von Thun: Embrace of the Serpent is a record of people who are extinct or who soon will be. Do you have any optimism that this process can be reversed, or is this a farewell to them?
Ciro Guerra: The main...
- 6/9/2016
- by CineVue UK
- CineVue
The following contains material from the November 2015 review when the film was presented at the St. Louis International Film Festival.
We often hear people remark about how they’ve got a tune or melody “stuck in their head”. The same thing could be said for certain…magical…memorable films. An image or a sequence can stay in your brain for a long, long while. Embrace Of The Serpent is one such cinematic experience. It’s based on a true story. Oh wait, it’s based on two true stories, linked together by one remarkable man and, perhaps, the most famous, celebrated river in the world, the Amazon. And the man is Karamakate, the last shaman of his jungle tribe. We first meet him in 1940, deep into his sixties as played by Antonio Bolivar, when he encounters a man foreign to his home, an American scientist Richard Evans Schultes (Brionne Davis...
We often hear people remark about how they’ve got a tune or melody “stuck in their head”. The same thing could be said for certain…magical…memorable films. An image or a sequence can stay in your brain for a long, long while. Embrace Of The Serpent is one such cinematic experience. It’s based on a true story. Oh wait, it’s based on two true stories, linked together by one remarkable man and, perhaps, the most famous, celebrated river in the world, the Amazon. And the man is Karamakate, the last shaman of his jungle tribe. We first meet him in 1940, deep into his sixties as played by Antonio Bolivar, when he encounters a man foreign to his home, an American scientist Richard Evans Schultes (Brionne Davis...
- 3/11/2016
- by Jim Batts
- WeAreMovieGeeks.com
More intriguing in its ambitions than in it successes, which are limited, and oddly keeps its distance from the very people it wants to enlighten us about. I’m “biast” (pro): nothing
I’m “biast” (con): nothing
(what is this about? see my critic’s minifesto)
Decades apart, two white scientists delve into the Amazonian rainforest in search of a rare plant with medicinal and hallucinatory qualities, with the assistance of a local shaman on opposite ends of his own life journey. Embrace of the Serpent attempts to frame the destruction of the rainforest’s ecology and peoples as a slow-motion tragedy on scales both personal and cultural, but it is more intriguing in its ambitions, which frustrate it, than in it successes, which are limited.
Colombian filmmaker Ciro Guerra and his cinematographer, David Gallego, shoot in black-and-white, which is at once visually distinctive but also rather flattening,...
I’m “biast” (con): nothing
(what is this about? see my critic’s minifesto)
Decades apart, two white scientists delve into the Amazonian rainforest in search of a rare plant with medicinal and hallucinatory qualities, with the assistance of a local shaman on opposite ends of his own life journey. Embrace of the Serpent attempts to frame the destruction of the rainforest’s ecology and peoples as a slow-motion tragedy on scales both personal and cultural, but it is more intriguing in its ambitions, which frustrate it, than in it successes, which are limited.
Colombian filmmaker Ciro Guerra and his cinematographer, David Gallego, shoot in black-and-white, which is at once visually distinctive but also rather flattening,...
- 2/28/2016
- by MaryAnn Johanson
- www.flickfilosopher.com
After a successful festival run last year, Embrace of the Serpent opened in select theaters in New York and Los Angeles last weekend. Our own Patrick Holzapfel wrote in part: "It is one of those films that rarely gets made, somehow a lost film in a lost place." We have an exclusive clip below that hints at the tone of the movie. The clip looks great, simply on its visual merits. For context, here's a quote from an interview with the director, where he talks about the inspiration for the messiah figure in the scene, referring to the diaries of ethnologist Theodor Koch-Grünberg and North American biologist Richard Evan Schultes, which spurred his creation of the film: "Later in the diaries there appears the story...
[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...
[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...
- 2/24/2016
- Screen Anarchy
After a successful festival run last year, Embrace of the Serpent opened in select theaters in New York and Los Angeles last weekend. Our own Patrick Holzapfel wrote in part: "It is one of those films that rarely gets made, somehow a lost film in a lost place." We have an exclusive clip below that hints at the tone of the movie. The clip looks great, simply on its visual merits. For context, here's a quote from an interview with the director, where he talks about the inspiration for the messiah figure in the scene, referring to the diaries of ethnologist Theodor Koch-Grünberg and North American biologist Richard Evan Schultes, which spurred his creation of the film: "Later in the diaries there appears the story...
[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...
[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...
- 2/24/2016
- Screen Anarchy
Ciro Guerra’s third feature Embrace of the Serpent is bracing for the novelty of its setting alone: a feature hasn’t been made in the Columbian Amazon region for 30something years. Without leaning solely on novelty value or simplistic exoticism, Embrace tells two stories. One, set in the early 20th century, is of Theodor Koch-Grunberg (Bivjoet), a real German ethnologist/explorer; at the story’s outset, he’s gravely ill and needs the help of solitary warrior Karamakate (Nilbio Torres) to find a rare plant that can cure him. Another story, some 40 or 50 years later, finds older Karamakate (Antonio Bolívar) guiding Richard Evans Schultes (Brionne Davis), another […]...
- 2/16/2016
- by Vadim Rizov
- Filmmaker Magazine - Blog
Inspired by Theodor Koch-Grunberg and Richard Evans Schultes, the first explorers of the Colombian Amazon, Embrace of the Serpent is a spiritual quest with a political regret. We follow two stories of German explorers (one of them is Jan Bijvoet of Borgman) meeting with an Amazonian shaman and searching for a healing plant. Director Ciro Guerra's third feature bears witness to the consequences of the European invasion that changed and destroyed culture and landscape of this stunning area of the world forever. But even more, it is a search for something beyond reach, something cosmic, maybe something that is not supposed to die. Like so many films it follows a clash between cultures, juxtapositions which always have to deal with otherness and in this case...
[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...
[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...
- 2/16/2016
- Screen Anarchy
With its focus on the effects of exploration by white men on foreign lands, Ciro Guerra’s Oscar-nominated Embrace of the Serpent will inevitably be compared to Werner Herzog’s stories of savage nature, and while Guerra is investigating some of Herzog’s most well trodden themes, the chaos of man exists in the background, while the unspoiled sit front and center here.
Embrace of the Serpent centers on two explorers, separated by decades in time, searching for Yakruna – a fictional sacred plant with hallucinogenic qualities – but the movie is more about how outsiders – whether consciously or unconsciously – exert control. The repercussions of colonialism hover over the text even as these characters have “noble” intentions.
Loosely based on the adventures of real life explorers, Richard Evans Schultes and Theodor Koch-Grünberg, Theodor (Jan Bijvoet) and Evan (Brionne Davis) are men of science who do their best not to step on the toes of outside cultures.
Embrace of the Serpent centers on two explorers, separated by decades in time, searching for Yakruna – a fictional sacred plant with hallucinogenic qualities – but the movie is more about how outsiders – whether consciously or unconsciously – exert control. The repercussions of colonialism hover over the text even as these characters have “noble” intentions.
Loosely based on the adventures of real life explorers, Richard Evans Schultes and Theodor Koch-Grünberg, Theodor (Jan Bijvoet) and Evan (Brionne Davis) are men of science who do their best not to step on the toes of outside cultures.
- 2/1/2016
- by Michael Snydel
- The Film Stage
"Before he can become a warrior, a man has to leave everything behind and go into the jungle, guided only by his dreams." Oscilloscope has released an official trailer for the film Embrace of the Serpent, the official Oscar Foreign Language entry this year from Colombia. It's a mesmerizing B&W feature described as a "violent, psychedelic film about colonization". The story follows two real explorers from history, Theodor Koch-Grünberg played by Jan Bijvoet and Richard Evan Schultes played by Brionne Davis, who travel through the Colombian Amazon in search of the sacred and difficult-to-find psychedelic Yakruna plant. This looks like an immersive and particularly unique storytelling experience, you might want to give this a watch. Here's the first official trailer for Ciro Guerra's Embrace of the Serpent, direct via YouTube: At once blistering and poetic, the ravages of colonialism cast a dark shadow over the South American landscape in Embrace of the Serpent,...
- 1/8/2016
- by Alex Billington
- firstshowing.net
The entire Academy Awards endeavour seems to expand every year, as more and more often, shortlists are announced during the behind-the-scenes nominations process, ahead of the final nominations announcement. While that tends to make the awards season feel even longer, it does much to raise the profile of films that might otherwise be little noticed by general audiences – including those submitted to the Academy for consideration as Best Foreign Film.
The Academy accepts one submission from each country, and the deadline for those submissions was October 1st this year. The selection process then has two phases. In the first phase, the Foreign Language Film Award Committee screens each submission, and selects six for shortlisting, with an additional three selected by the Foreign Language Film Award Executive Committee. This set of nine films is then announced as the shortlist, and this is the announcement we have seen today.
The shortlisted films...
The Academy accepts one submission from each country, and the deadline for those submissions was October 1st this year. The selection process then has two phases. In the first phase, the Foreign Language Film Award Committee screens each submission, and selects six for shortlisting, with an additional three selected by the Foreign Language Film Award Executive Committee. This set of nine films is then announced as the shortlist, and this is the announcement we have seen today.
The shortlisted films...
- 12/22/2015
- by Sarah Myles
- We Got This Covered
Sundance 2016 is fast approaching. Last week we posted the movie lineup of Midnight and Competition film selections. We now have the complete lineup for the premieres in both the feature film and documentary categories. We also have their selections for the Spotlight and Kid films. I've also included a list of special events.
There are a lot of great films on this list that I'm excited about seeing because of the incredible talent involved. Viggo Mortensen and Frank Langella star in Captain Fantastic; Laura Dern, Kristen Stewart, Michelle Williams star in Certain Women; Rachel Weisz, Michael Shannon, Kathy Bates and Danny Glover star in Complete Unknown; Paul Rudd and Selena Gomez star in The Fundamentals of Caring; John Krasinski directed a film called The Hollars which he stars in with Anna Kendrick, Margo Martindale, Richard Jenkins, Sharlto Copley, and Charlie Day; Thor: Ragnarok director Taika Waititi has made a new...
There are a lot of great films on this list that I'm excited about seeing because of the incredible talent involved. Viggo Mortensen and Frank Langella star in Captain Fantastic; Laura Dern, Kristen Stewart, Michelle Williams star in Certain Women; Rachel Weisz, Michael Shannon, Kathy Bates and Danny Glover star in Complete Unknown; Paul Rudd and Selena Gomez star in The Fundamentals of Caring; John Krasinski directed a film called The Hollars which he stars in with Anna Kendrick, Margo Martindale, Richard Jenkins, Sharlto Copley, and Charlie Day; Thor: Ragnarok director Taika Waititi has made a new...
- 12/13/2015
- by Joey Paur
- GeekTyrant
Kate Plays ChristineThe lineup for the 2016 Sundance Film Festival, taking place between January 21 -31, has been announced.U.S. Dramatic COMPETITIONAs You Are (Miles Joris-Peyrafitte, USA): As You Are is the telling and retelling of a relationship between three teenagers as it traces the course of their friendship through a construction of disparate memories prompted by a police investigation. Cast: Owen Campbell, Charlie Heaton, Amandla Stenberg, John Scurti, Scott Cohen, Mary Stuart Masterson. World Premiere The Birth of a Nation (Nate Parker, USA): Set against the antebellum South, this story follows Nat Turner, a literate slave and preacher whose financially strained owner, Samuel Turner, accepts an offer to use Nat’s preaching to subdue unruly slaves. After witnessing countless atrocities against fellow slaves, Nat devises a plan to lead his people to freedom. Cast: Nate Parker, Armie Hammer, Aja Naomi King, Jackie Earle Haley, Gabrielle Union, Mark Boone Jr. World PremiereChristine (Antonio Campos,...
- 12/7/2015
- by Notebook
- MUBI
Top brass at the Park City festival have rounded out the feature line-up with a dazzling selection on paper that includes new work from Asif Kapadia and other returning alumni such as Todd Solondz, Taika Waititi and Joshua Marston.Scroll Down For Full List
Road movie The Fundamentals Of Caring by Rob Burnett starring Paul Rudd will close the festival, while Maggie Greenwald’s Sophie And The Rising Sun is the Salt Lake City Gala Film. Heid Ewing and Rachel Grady’s Norman Lear: Just Another Version Of You is a Day One Film.
The Premieres line-up introduces Indignation, the feature directorial debut from former Focus Features CEO and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon screenwriter James Schamus, and the latest world premieres from John Carney, Kenneth Lonergan, Ira Sachs and Diego Luna.
The Documentary Premieres section encompass latest films from Werner Herzog, Spike Lee, Liz Garbus and Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato.
The Spotlight...
Road movie The Fundamentals Of Caring by Rob Burnett starring Paul Rudd will close the festival, while Maggie Greenwald’s Sophie And The Rising Sun is the Salt Lake City Gala Film. Heid Ewing and Rachel Grady’s Norman Lear: Just Another Version Of You is a Day One Film.
The Premieres line-up introduces Indignation, the feature directorial debut from former Focus Features CEO and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon screenwriter James Schamus, and the latest world premieres from John Carney, Kenneth Lonergan, Ira Sachs and Diego Luna.
The Documentary Premieres section encompass latest films from Werner Herzog, Spike Lee, Liz Garbus and Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato.
The Spotlight...
- 12/7/2015
- by jeremykay67@gmail.com (Jeremy Kay)
- ScreenDaily
Top brass at the Park City festival have rounded out the feature line-up with a dazzling selection on paper that includes new work from Asif Kapadia and other returning alumni such as Todd Solondz, Taika Waititi and Joshua Marston.Scroll Down For Full List
Road movie The Fundamentals Of Caring by Rob Burnett starring Paul Rudd will close the festival, while Maggie Greenwald’s Sophie And The Rising Sun is the Salt Lake City Gala Film. Heid Ewing and Rachel Grady’s Norman Lear: Just Another Version Of You is a Day One Film.
The Premieres line-up introduces Indignation, the feature directorial debut from former Focus Features CEO and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon screenwriter James Schamus, and the latest world premieres from John Carney, Kenneth Lonergan, Ira Sachs and Diego Luna.
The Documentary Premieres section encompass latest films from Werner Herzog, Spike Lee, Liz Garbus and Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato.
The Spotlight...
Road movie The Fundamentals Of Caring by Rob Burnett starring Paul Rudd will close the festival, while Maggie Greenwald’s Sophie And The Rising Sun is the Salt Lake City Gala Film. Heid Ewing and Rachel Grady’s Norman Lear: Just Another Version Of You is a Day One Film.
The Premieres line-up introduces Indignation, the feature directorial debut from former Focus Features CEO and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon screenwriter James Schamus, and the latest world premieres from John Carney, Kenneth Lonergan, Ira Sachs and Diego Luna.
The Documentary Premieres section encompass latest films from Werner Herzog, Spike Lee, Liz Garbus and Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato.
The Spotlight...
- 12/7/2015
- by jeremykay67@gmail.com (Jeremy Kay)
- ScreenDaily
We often hear people remark about how they’ve got a tune or melody “stuck in their head”. The same thing could be said for certain…magical…memorable films. An image or a sequence can stay in your brain for a long, long while. Embrace Of The Serpent is one such cinematic experience. It’s based on a true story. Oh wait, it’s based on two true stories, linked together by one remarkable man and, perhaps, the most famous, celebrated river in the world, the Amazon. And the man is Karamakate, the last shaman of his jungle tribe. We first meet him in 1940, deep into his sixties as played by Antonio Bolivar, when he encounters a man foreign to his home, an American scientist Richard Evans Schultes (Brionne Davis), who is in search of the healing plant, the yakruna. He had read about it in the diary of another scientist,...
- 11/5/2015
- by Jim Batts
- WeAreMovieGeeks.com
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