“Embrace of the Serpent” Screening at the Parrish

[caption id="attachment_62796" align="alignnone" width="538"] Photo by Andrés Córdoba / Courtesy of Oscilloscope Laboratories[/caption]

“Embrace of the Serpent,” a film that tells the story of the Amazonian shaman Karamakate and his friendship with two Western scientists, will be shown at the Parrish Art Museum on Friday, April 14 at 6 p.m. at a screening in collaboration with the Hamptons International Film Festival.

The film by Ciro Guerra was inspired by the real life journals of Theodor Koch-Grünberg and Richard Evans Schultes, two scientists who searched the Colombian Amazon for a sacred, psychedelic Yakruna healing plant over the course of 40 years.

The film explores the Amazon during the infiltration of rubber barons and ravages of Christian colonialism. Shot in black-and-white, “Embrace of the Serpent,” was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film during the 2016 Academy Awards, the first film from Colombia to ever be nominated.

“Embrace of the Serpent is an important meditation on the relationship and tensions between Western and indigenous cultures from both viewpoints,” Curator of Special Projects, Corinne Erni said. “I am very pleased that this film continues our collaboration with the Hamptons International Film Festival.”

“Embrace of the Serpent” was filmed over an eight-week period on location and follows two timelines. The first focuses on Karamakate in his youth, and the other on the shaman’s latter days. In the early 1900s, Karamakate traveled with the German ethnologist Koch-Grünberg (1887-1924) in search of the plant. Decades later, he took up the search again with Schultes, (1915-2001) a Harvard educated American known as the father of modern ethnobotany. In creating the film, Guerra researched the early diaries of the two men who were the first foreign scientists to live and work with the native people of the Amazon. The comprehensive writings, notes and photographs left by Schultes provided an intimate look into the Amazonian world.

Ciro Guerra, born in Colombia in 1981, studied film and television at the National University of Colombia. At 21, after directing four multi-award-winning short films, he wrote and directed his feature directorial debut, “La Sombra Del Caminante,” (The Wandering Shadows) which won awards at the San Sebastian, Toulouse, Mar de Plata, Trieste, Havana, Quito, Cartagena, Santiago and Warsaw film festivals and was selected for 60 more including Tribeca, Locarno, Seoul, Pesaro, Seattle and Hamburg.

This film is not rated and runs 125 minutes. Tickets cost $20 and $5 for members. Friday Nights are made possible, in part, by the generous support of the Corcoran Group and Bridgehampton National Bank.

The Parrish Art Museum is located at 279 Montauk Highway in Water Mill. For more information, please call (631) 283-2118 or visit parrishart.org.