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?

| es

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

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.

| en

Burden of Dreams

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.

1982-10-01 | en

Metamorphosis

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.

2009-06-12 | en

Toroboro: The Name of the Plants

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.

2024-09-12 | es

Manifesting the Mind: Footprints of the Shaman

In these interviews, Dennis McKenna, Alex Grey, Rick Strassman, and other champions of psychedelics share their views on the value of psychedelic medicine, and its neglect in Western society.

2009-01-01 | en

The Knowledge of Healing

A documentary film about Tibetan traditional medicine.

1997-05-22 | de

O Rio Negro São as Pessoas

2019-06-01 | pt

Amazon

Explore the mysterious Amazon through the amazing IMAX experience. Amazon celebrates the beauty, vitality and wonder of the rapidly disappearing rain forest.

1997-01-01 | en

Waiting

Workers on strike who have not been paid for months and tourists who are forced to wait in their steamy cars in the middle of the tourist season. Krk Bridge, Croatia. August 16th, 2012.

2014-02-27 | hr

Amazonie, les murmures de la forêt

2023-03-19 | fr

Auf Messers Schneide - Eine Geschichte der Chirurgie

2024-07-20 | de

The Secret of the Secret

The traditional healers in the Swiss and French mountains.

2000-02-21 | en

Up the Yangtze

At the edge of the Yangtze River, not far from the Three Gorges Dam, young men and women take up employment on a cruise ship, where they confront rising waters and a radically changing China.

2007-09-30 | zh

Miwene

Steeped in the long oral tradition of Waorani storytelling, Gange Yeti shares her own coming-of-age story as a young Waorani woman living deep within the Amazon rainforest. Following Gange and her community for over 11 years, the film captures her transition from a quiet teenager into a confident young mother at a critical turning point for her culture and rainforest. As the granddaughter of one of the last Waorani elders that lived in complete isolation before outside contact, Gange is determined to capture her grandmother’s unique experience while she still can -- balancing school, motherhood, and tradition along the way.

2022-10-16 | es