*Please note that there is a £1.50 fee per transaction

Embrace Of The Serpent (18)

With an introduction by Tony Eccles, Curator of Ethnography, RAMM

English subtitles

Dir. Ciro Guerra, Columbia, Venezuela, Argentina, 2015, 125 mins

Colombian filmmaker Ciro Guerra presents a breathtaking journey through the Amazon following the interwoven stories of two European explorers; one in the early 1900s, the other 40 years later.

In 1909, an ailing German explorer enlists the help of a young shaman in his search for a rare and exotic flower that he believes could cure him of his fatal illness. The pair journey through rivers and jungles ravaged by European colonialism. In a parallel narrative set in the same region in 1940, an American explorer conducts his own search for the elusive flower in the company of the same, now aged shaman in a landscape brutalised by the rubber trade.

Shot in mesmerising monochrome, the film was inspired by the real-life journals of two explorers (Theodor Koch-Grünberg and Richard Evans Schultes) and its rich visual texture captures a haunting mysticism and an unstoppable moral conviction. Embrace of the Serpent is by turns astonishing and terrifyingly ferocious; both a hypnotically beautiful ode to life in the Amazon and an unequivocally searing critique of the harrowing effects of colonialism.

Showing Times:

• Mon 4 Jul: 7.30pm
• Thu 7 Jul: 7.30pm

 Venue: Studio 74, Exeter Phoenix