Tracking two parallel odysseys through the Amazon, this historical epic from Colombian filmmaker Ciro Guerra offers ethno-botanical adventure, mysticism, and a heart-rending depiction of colonialism laying waste to indigenous culture. In 1909, an ailing German explorer enlists the help of a young shaman in his search for a rare flower that he believes could cure him of his fatal illness. Their journey takes them through rivers and jungles ravaged by European interference, climaxing at a mission where a sadistic Spanish priest lords over a huddle of young indigenous orphans. Meanwhile, 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 brutalized by the rubber trade.

The film was inspired by the real-life journals of two explorers (Theodor Koch-Grünberg and Richard Evans Schultes) who travelled through the Colombian Amazon during the last century in search of the sacred and difficult-to-find psychedelic Yakruna plant.

Recalling such visionary films as Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man and Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God, this elegiac adventure story surveys a vanishing way of life and the natural world that we neglect (and abuse) at our peril. The film marks the first time Colombia has ever been nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award

"By the end of this transcendent odyssey one feels transformed and renewed" ★★★★★ Cine-Vue

"the film’s influences are plain: Herzog, ‘Apocalypse Now’, Tarkovsky and heavy psychedelics" ★★★★ Time Out

"a gripping and absorbing piece of work." ★★★★ Guardian

"extraordinary, hypnotic work" ★★★★★ Observer

Please note that doors open 30 minutes before the advertised start time.