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The greatest film ever made about the Amazon. The dichromatic palette sets the film firmly in the past—one with just a hint of real history, like a brittle old issue of National Geographic come to life. The mysteries keep piling up through the final frames, when black-and-white film can’t contain the story any longer and it bursts with unworldly color. You won’t want to wake up.” Ryan Kearney, THE NEW REPUBLIC

EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT tells 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, become the first men to travel the Northwest Amazon in search of ancestral knowledge. Inspired by the journals of the first explorers of the Colombian Amazon, German ethnologist Theodor Koch-Grunberg and American botanist Richard Evans Schultes.

Karamakate, a powerful Amazonian shaman, last survivor of his people, dwells deep in the jungle, in voluntary isolation. Decades of solitude have turned him into a chullachaqui, an empty shell of a human, devoid of memories and emotion. His hollow life is shaken with the arrival of Evan, an American ethnobotanist in search of the Yakruna, a powerful sacred plant, capable of teaching how to dream. Together they embark on a journey into the heart of the Amazon in which past, present and future are intertwined, and in which Karamakate will slowly begin to regain his lost memories.

"Visually and emotionally stunning."
Stephen Romei - The Australian