Embrace of the Serpent (2015)

Ciro Guerra's Embrace of the Serpent arrives in black and white, which is the correct decision for a film about the slow subtraction of a continent. Two journeys, thirty years apart, share a shaman named Karamakate and a canoe. The dialogue is largely in Ocaina, Ticuna, Bora and other languages, spoken by people drawn from the communities in question. Antonio Bolívar, one of the last remaining Ocaina speakers, plays the older Karamakate, and the film is built around him with a care that most productions reserve for their catering. This is representation done properly: not a gesture, an architecture.

Guerra's target is the rubber boom, the missions, and the gentlemen scientists who arrive with notebooks and leave with everything. The Amazon is stripped on screen, its trees taken for profit, its people converted and enslaved, and the film regards each transaction with the flat patience of an accountant reviewing a ledger. The critique of extraction is total. Nobody in this film gets rich without something being ruined, usually something that cannot be replaced. The historical record is rearranged so that the indigenous perspective sits at the centre, which is a legitimate act of reclamation and also, plainly, a revision.

Where the film declines to lecture, it mostly trusts its images, and its sermons stay brief and poetic. Women are nearly absent. There is no romantic subplot of any kind. The film has no interest in the body, in diagnosis, or in the contemporary vocabulary of identity beyond the colonial wound itself. It is an old-fashioned kind of angry, the kind that trusts a river to make its argument. We have graded harder-working films more generously. We have also graded worse ones higher, which is the business we are in.