Music is a key element, with Evan refusing to abandon the clumsy gramophone that reconnects him with his own ancestry, even as he strives to become the “vagabond of dreams” of whom Karamakate has spoken so intensely. “Don’t let our song fade away,” Karamakate tells the young boys, a phrase mournfully echoed in the closing dedication. When Théo and his companion Manduca (Yauenkü Migue) seek supplies at an upriver Catholic mission, they find “orphans of the rubber wars” being beaten into forgetting their native tongue by a priest who claims to be saving them from “cannibalism and ignorance”. Memories (both present and absent) flow back and forth through this story. David Gallego’s breathtaking 35mm cinematography lends widescreen monochrome beauty Such coexistence is central to the film’s own form, with images of persistent water uniting distant time periods past, present and future flowing together in a single unending stream, separate boats on the same river. “You are not one – you are two men,” Karamakate tells Evan as he retraces Théo’s steps, apparently perceiving his separate companions to be two incarnations of the same soul. Skilfully fusing the apparently logical manmade narratives of its western explorers with the animal imagery and fluid time-structures of Amazonian myth (the title invokes celestial beings descending to earth on a giant anaconda), Guerra conjures a complex landscape that straddles the divide between dreamy invention, ethnographic document and socio-political tract. Crucially, it is through Karamakate’s eyes that we come to view the unfolding narrative, reversing the colonial modes that have exoticised the jungle as merely a maddening subset of European or north American experience. Having lost his tribe, believed to have been wiped out by rubber barons, the ageing Karamakate fears that he has become a “ chullachaqui” – an ‘empty, hollow’ version of himself that has “no memories”, but “drifts around in the world… lost in time without time”. Our true focus, however, is Karamakate, the warrior-shaman who guides both men, played in his younger, more fiery years by Nilbio Torres, and in dissolute later life by Antonio Bolívar. Watch a trailer for Embrace of the Serpent. Shot on location in the jungles of Vaupés, but with none of the cultural tourism that often blights such projects, Guerra’s honest, impassioned, inventive film coils itself around its audience in a transcendent cinematic embrace. Mixing fact and fiction in fable-like fashion, Guerra’s third feature (which secured Colombia’s first Oscar nomination for best foreign language film) offers both a bold indictment of colonial imperialism and a powerful celebration of disappearing cultures.ĭescribed by its creator as “an attempt to build a bridge between western and Amazonian storytelling”, this achieves an astonishing sense of universality while focusing on a world from which most viewers have traditionally been alienated. T his extraordinary, hypnotic work by Colombian director Ciro Guerra seems at first glance to be a dreamy inversion of the themes of Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo and Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, turning a generic heart of darkness into a crucible of light, as seen from the perspective of indigenous Amazonian tribespeople.
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