Embrace of the Serpent

Academy Award® Nominee – Best Foreign Language Film

2015 Cannes Film Festival – Directors’ Fortnight – Winner – CIACE Art Cinema Award
2015 Toronto International Film Festival – Official Selection
2015 AFI FEST – Official Selection
2015 Mar Del Plata International Film Festival – Winner – Golden Astor
2015 Macondo Awards (Colombian Academy Awards) – Winner – Eight awards including Best Film 2016 Film Independent Spirit Awards – Nominee – Best International Film
2016 Sundance Film Festival – Official Selection

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.

Megan Epler Wood is the Director of the International Sustainable Tourism Initiative at the Center for Health and the Global Environment, at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University where she leads an international research program on tools to mitigate tourism’s growing global impacts.  In 1986, she and her husband Greg were Fulbright Scholars in Colombia, where they produced, shot and edited a science documentary, Destino Nublado, on the unique biodiversity of the that country’s rain forest and the importance of conservation, distributed by World Wildlife Fund-U.S.  She has received support from the Nature Conservancy, Cultural Survival, USAID and local entrepreneurs to develop ecotourism strategies to conserve the Amazon and its indigenous cultures since 1995.