Embrace of the Serpent
Oscilloscope Laboratories
•
2h 4m
Directed by Ciro Guerra • Drama • With Nilbio Torres, Antonio Bolívar, Jan Bijvoet • 2015 • 125 minutes
At once blistering and poetic, the ravages of colonialism cast a dark shadow over the South American landscape in EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT, the third feature by Ciro Guerra. Filmed in stunning black-and-white, SERPENT centers on Karamakate, an Amazonian shaman and the last survivor of his people, and the two scientists 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 Koch-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.
—2015 Cannes Film Festival
—2016 Sundance Film Festival
Up Next in Oscilloscope Laboratories
-
A Film Unfinished
Directed by Yael Hersonski • Documentary • 2010 • 90 minutes
This potent documentary uses a long-lost film reel to illustrate how the Nazis controlled images of Jewish life during World War II. Though the Nazis made a propaganda movie of contented Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, the missing spool exp...
-
Frontrunners
Directed by Caroline Suh • Documentary • 2008 • 83 minutes
Frontrunners is a smart and funny political documentary that follows the student council presdiential campaign at one of the country's most prestigious public high schools: Stuyvesant High School in New York City. Follow four charming an...
-
Gunnin' for that #1 Spot
Directed by Adam Yauch • Documentary • 2008 • 97 minutes
On the corner of 155th Street and Frederick Douglas Boulevard in Harlem, New York, lies Rucker Park. By appearances, the green concrete pavement, anchored on either end by its run down slab bleachers, is no different than any other basketb...