Shot in Venezuela over a 30-year period, this documentary depicts the life and work of José Maria Korta, the controversial Jesuit Missionary with the Ye'kwana people of the Amazon.
José Maria Korta Lasarte
as Self
James, giving himself 12 months before he has "a license to kill himself," sets off to the Amazon rainforest with hopes of finding a shaman who can save his life.
On the border of Surinam and French Guyana, indigenous Wayana territory is overrun by intruders. Illegal gold miners poison the river, missionaries repress indigenous identity, and even doctors with the best intentions leave marks that are often silently violent. The Wayana call these intruders Parasisi.
Follows Martin Strel as he attempts to cover 3,375 miles of the Amazon River in what is being billed as the world's longest swim.
Deep in the jungles of Peru, a silky anteater is fighting to stay awake and a mother humming bird is struggling to raise her chick. Through millions of years of evolution they have developed bizarre relationships and unexpected strategies to overcome them changing conditions, but for all their ingenuity, they were never prepared for the arrival of a new species on the scene.
After a plane crash, four indigenous children fight to survive in the Colombian Amazon using ancestral wisdom as an unprecedented rescue mission unfolds.
Explore the mysterious Amazon through the amazing IMAX experience. Amazon celebrates the beauty, vitality and wonder of the rapidly disappearing rain forest.
An enigmatic presence haunts the depths of the Amazon rainforest, where an indigenous Achuar teenager has disappeared. During the search for the young man, his family decides to consult with a Shaman, who, immersed in trance, reveals that the young man was taken by the devil, but that he has intervened by showing him the way back to his home. While waiting for his return, secrets of the rainforest and Amazonian visions of life after death are touched, vanishing the documentary filmmaker’s concepts of reality.
Filmed in the jungles of Peru, shaman Don Jose Campos introduces the practices and benefits of Ayahuasca, the psychoactive plant brew that has been used for healing and visionary journeys by Amazonian shamans for at least a thousand years.
A botanical expedition in Ecuador's Amazon becomes a medium for an indigenous Huaorani community to remember the genocidal colonization it suffered in the 1960s. Meanwhile, a group of ecologists from the capital tries to stop oil exploitation in the last remaining forests where the isolated Huaoranis still live, who to this day refuse to come into contact with civilization.
Documentary by Portuguese Silvino Santos, about the Amazon, its flora, fauna, its inhabitants and among other wonderful images from the beginning of the 20th century with alternating close-up shots of caimans, jaguars and tropical flora with footage of Indigenous rituals--including some of the earliest known moving images of the Indigenous Witoto people--and longer sequences showcasing the region’s extractive industries: rubber, the Brazil nut, timber, fishing, even the egret feathers that were a staple of women’s fashion at the time.
Across the Amazon, Indigenous guards are unarmed patrols that peacefully defend ancestral territories against threats like oil, mining and poaching. They use diverse technologies to monitor their lands, and when necessary, force out illegal operations and actors. Most of this daily work, which involves lengthy hikes and patient observation, goes unseen. This film depicts the process of the Indigenous Guard: its patrols, its watchful vigilance over the landscape, and its support of the community. Their work as guards helps ensure that destruction in the Amazon doesn’t advance, and that their community has the vital space it needs to live life on their own terms.
The imagination of history in Ecuador never thought that oil, “its redeeming hope”, discovered in the Lago Agrio No. 1 well, was going to mean the beginning of the worst environmental catastrophe on the planet. Thirty years of operation and exploitation of the Texaco company, forever transformed the rivers and estuaries, the forests and the life of the indigenous communities in the northern Amazon of Ecuador.
No animal in the Amazon is more feared and more respected than the 'spirit of the river' - The Anaconda
Comments on the history of a people, made by the filmmakers and their characters. From the time of contact, through captivity in rubber plantations, to the current work with video, the testimonies give meaning to the process of dispersion, loss and reunion experienced by the Huni kui.
The Amazon rain forest, 1979. The crew of Fitzcarraldo (1982), a film directed by German director Werner Herzog, soon finds itself with problems related to casting, tribal struggles and accidents, among many other setbacks; but nothing compared to dragging a huge steamboat up a mountain, while Herzog embraces the path of a certain madness to make his vision come true.
Hamilton Souther is the founder of Blue Morpho Tours, a company that caters to ayahuasca tourists in the Peruvian Amazon. Souther talks about the events that led him to Amazonian shamanism. Five first-time ayahuasca drinkers on a nine-day retreat with Blue Morpho relate their experiences.
The last two surviving members of the Piripkura people, a nomadic tribe in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil, struggle to maintain their indigenous way of life amidst the region's massive deforestation. Living deep in the rainforest, Pakyî and Tamandua live off the land relying on a machete, an ax, and a torch lit in 1998.