Amazonia: Healing with Sacred Plants

Psychologist and anthropologist Alberto Villoldo talks with traditional healers of Madre de Dios, a department within in Peruvian Amazonia. They and Dr. Villoldo explain aspects of ayahuasca, a powerful, plant-based medicine of crucial importance.

2015-07-01 | en

The Man Who Drank the Universe

It is late 2004, and 34-year-old Englishman Alistair Appleton is about to fly from London to the Brazilian coast, where he will drink ayahuasca for the first time. With wit, insight, and sensitivity, Alistair shares this experience with us, and chats with some fellow participants before and after the ayahuasca ceremonies. For the past few years, Alistair had been working as a television presenter. In 2000, he started making trips to the Centre for World Peace and Health in Scotland to learn how to meditate. When clinical psychologist Silvia Polivoy opened an ayahuasca healing center in Bahia in 2004, Alistair faced his fears and seized the opportunity to attend.

2005-01-01 | en

The Medicine of Forgiveness

Benito Arévalo is an onaya: a traditional healer in a Shipibo-Konibo community in Peruvian Amazonia. He explains something of the onaya tradition, and how he came to drink the plant medicine ayahuasca under his father's tutelage. Arévalo leads an ayahuasca ceremony for Westerners, and shares with us something of his understanding of the plants and the onaya tradition.

2001-01-01 | es

Voices That Heal

Herlinda Augustin is a Shipibo healer who lives with her family in Peruvian Amazonia. Will she and other healers be able to maintain their ancient tradition despite Western encroachment?

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Ayahuasca Diary

Four Westerners with various ailments travel to Peruvian Amazonia to drink ayahuasca, a traditional medicine renowned for its healing powers.

2009-01-01 | en

Ayahuasca: Einer uralten Medizin auf der Spur

2017-10-03 | de

L'Iboga: Les Hommes du bois sacré

A documentary about iboga, a medicinal tree root that is the basis of the bwiti religion in Gabon.

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Grazing the Amazon

There are 85 million cows in the Brazilian Amazon, which means three cows for each human dweller grazing today and area that was once forest. Less than fifty years ago, in the 1970s, the rainforest was intact. Since then, a portion the size of France has disappeared, 66% of which transformed into pastures. Much of this change is a consequence of government incentives that attracted thousands of farmers from southern lands. Cattle ranching became an economic and cultural banner of the Amazon, forging powerful politicians to defend it. In 2009, there was a game changer: the Public Prosecutor's Office sued large slaughterhouses, forcing them to supervise cattle supplying farms.

2018-06-12 | pt

The Song That Calls You Home

A personal, scientific, mystical exploration of Amazonian curanderismo, focus on Ayahuasca and Master Plants, their healing and visionary properties and risks, along with the Shipibo people and their songs.

2022-10-25 | en

Big River Man

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.

2009-01-15 | en

Amazonie, les murmures de la forêt

2023-03-19 | fr

O Rio Negro São as Pessoas

2019-06-01 | pt

Tears in the Amazon

A documentary about environment destruction in the Amazon and the tribes living there. Produced for the 48th anniversary of MBC, Korea. A brilliant records of the itinerary for 250 days through the Amazon.

2010-03-25 | ko

A Natural Way

Epic ground-breaking journey across India, China and Tibet to explore alternative medicine. With healthcare costs soaring in the west, looking east to alternative medicine is the answer. Now is the time to take the journey that will lead to better health – A Natural Way.

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The World According to Amazon

This film dives into the world of Amazon, its story and view of the world. It offers a large social fresco backed up by an in-depth investigation where private lives meet the mega-machine.

2019-11-29 | fr

Gloria's Call

In 1971, graduate student Gloria Orenstein received a call from Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington that sparked a lifelong journey into art, ecofeminism and shamanism. This short film uses art, animation and storytelling to celebrate this wild adventure. Now more than 40 years later, award-winning Dr. Gloria Feman Orenstein is a feminist art critic and pioneer scholar of women in Surrealism and ecofeminism in the arts. Her delightful tale brings alive an often unseen history of women in the arts.

2019-10-05 | en

The Last Forest

In powerful images, alternating between documentary observation and staged sequences, and dense soundscapes, Luiz Bolognesi documents the Indigenous community of the Yanomami and depicts their threatened natural environment in the Amazon rainforest.

2021-04-18 | pt

Auf der Suche nach Heilern

“I am a hypochondriac”, admits Rosa Von Praunheim, the icon of the gay movement, right at the beginning at the film. The director, who turned seventy in 2012, is afraid of cancer, and he actually suffers from glaucoma, with osteoarthritis in his big toe. Von Praunheim is interested in alternative medicine and goes on a foray into the scene.

2014-05-09 | de

The Secret of the Secret

The traditional healers in the Swiss and French mountains.

2000-02-21 | en

Auf Messers Schneide - Eine Geschichte der Chirurgie

2024-07-20 | de