Seventh Cinema: Embrace of the Serpent

Embrace of the Serpent (2015) 2h 5m. Directed by Ciro Guerra.

Embrace of the Serpent is a 2015 internationally co-produced adventure drama film directed by Ciro Guerra, and written by Guerra and Jacques Toulemonde Vidal. Shot almost entirely in black and white, the film follows two journeys made thirty years apart by the indigenous shaman Karamakate in the Colombian Amazonian jungle, one with Theo, a German ethnographer, and the other with Evan, an American botanist, both of whom are searching for the rare plant yakruna. It was inspired by the travel diaries of Theodor Koch-Grünberg and Richard Evans Schultes, and dedicated to lost Amazonian cultures.

"The mystical allure of Ciro Guerra's adventure-in-the-Amazon drama Embrace of the Serpent is so potent that it might take you a while to realize you're watching an anti-colonialist parable. Maybe that's the key to a good allegory: You feel the ideas seeping into your skin rather than conking you on the head." STEPHANIE ZACHAREK, TIME MAGAZINE 

Concerning Violence 

We are pleased that Seventh Cinema is back for a second season! 

This year's curated film program is anchored in Martinican psychiatrist and anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon’s often-misunderstood and overly read essay Concerning Violence from his 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth. For this season, we have curated films that engage with Fanon’s work in the spirit he intended - not as an endorsement of violent action, but as a confrontation of the processes that drive the colonised to employ violence. This season includes seminal films such as The Battle of Algiers, one of cinema’s great political masterpieces, which charts the Algerian national liberation movement from its beginnings in 1954 through to independence in 1962. Also featured is Embrace of the Serpent, a visually stunning work filmed on 35mm in the Amazon, set against the violent backdrop of the colonial rubber trade. Dulce Fernandes' film essay Tales of Oblivion by offers a meditative reflection on the physical and cultural remnants of colonial atrocities in our present landscapes  - a 15th-century landfill turned car park and mini golf course, museum artefacts - capturing the haunting echoes of the horrific trade in human beings. 

We welcome you to join us in viewing these important films and reflecting on their profound relevance to the present. This season invites a critical examination of colonialism within our local context and the atrocities unfolding further afield. In engaging with Fanon’s work, we are called to consider the responsibilities of Western intellectuals and nations in perpetuating or dismantling colonial systems. Most importantly, these films challenge us to ask: what is our role in the revolution?

Screenings are free to attend, and all are welcome.