PROVIDING a profound experience away from the cinematic mainstream, this beautiful black and white film has won 22 awards and was Colombia’s entry in last year’s Foreign Language category at the Oscars.

Writer/director Ciro Guerra drew on the work of two men whose ethnographic and botanical studies in the Amazon basin form the foundation for what we now know about the area and its indigenous people. Do you reckon that’s the formula for a dry-as-dust movie? You’d be wrong.

German ethnographer Theodor Koch-Grunberg explored the great river from 1911 to 1913. The film renames him as Theodor von Martius (Jan Bijvoet) and provides partly-educated young native Manduca (Yauenku Migue) as his assistant. Several decades later, American academic Richard Evans Schultes (Brionne Davis) was the father of ethnobotany.

Guerra fictionalises both scientists and introduces a tribesman, Karamakate (Nilbio Torres in the von Martius sequences and Antonio Bolivar in the Evans sequences). At both the ages in which those actors portray him, he is a beautiful human being, untrammelled by clothing apart from a loin belt and pouch. He is a shaman whose wisdom and knowledge not only uphold the survival of the European explorers but also form a narrative support for the search for the yakruna plant described in myth as the cure for many ailments.

The screenplay segues between both explorers as they travel across the effects, mostly detrimental, of European intrusion on their lands, spiritual beliefs and cultures. The wildlife sequences are few but impressive, particularly the birth of a clutch of anacondas and some superb close-ups of a jaguar.

At Palace Electric