Embrace Of The Serpent (Ciro Guerra, 2015): Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina

Reviewed by Omar Gomez. Viewed at the AFI Fest 2015.

Ciro Guerra’s film is a story taking place in the surroundings of the beautiful Amazon river. The adventures of two German scientists show a series of simultaneous events occurring on different parts of the Amazon, where the two get separated and come across colonial natives that guide them along the area. Subsequently they encounter ethical dilemmas in their journey for new knowledge. This film manifests the different perspectives of South American cultures on religion and how the colonization of the continent affected the well constructed spiritual views of earlier societies, which still are the base of many beliefs today. It also contrasted the difference between belief and religion, which is an important view to display in our society today. Embrace Of The Serpent is an ideal film for those seeking an important message about how our morals should develop, it exposes many controversy in earlier religious practices, but it also enlightens the audience by introducing a different view on the representation of what it means to be a good person and how virtues can be build from a different spiritual view. To summarize, Ciro’s film brings a strong message, with a very interesting insight on how Theodore Koch-Grunberg (Jan Bijvoet) and Richard Evans Schulte (Brionne Davis), two German scientists try to use their survival skills in the 1900 Amazon forest.