Indigenous knowledge

The plant medicine hayakwaska (ayahuasca), marketed as a mystical shortcut to healing and enlightenment, is an example of what the Indigenous storyteller Nina Gualinga, sees as commodification and extractivism in the Amazon. Nina is from the Kichwa people of Sarayaku, Ecuador, and she speaks with the memory of her shaman grandfather about the ongoing cultural appropriation, environmental destruction and marginalisation of her people, questioning our very relationship to the Earth and the quest for healing.
Film by: Nina Gualinga
Co-Directors: Boloh Miranda, Elizabeth Swanson
Producers: Marc Silver, Nina Gualinga

2025 / 15 mins

The film explores ayahuasca, a medicine not just for individuals, but one that is used to heal history, imagination and humanity’s broken relationship with nature itself.

2022 / 75 mins

While millions of people around the world have been forced into lockdown amid the coronavirus crisis, a family in the Ecuadorian Amazon has opted to move deeper into the relative safety of the jungle. As they reconnect with dormant ancestral knowledge their affinity with nature begins to flourish.

2021 / 16 mins

The Kichwa tribe in the Sarayaku region of the Ecuadorian Amazon believe in the Living Forest where humans, animals and plants live in harmony. They are fighting oil companies who want to exploit their ancestral land. A delegation of indigenous people are at the Paris COP21 climate conference to make sure their voices are heard. Can they win their battle?

2015 / 9 mins

The film explores the murky world of genetic sampling, engineering and ownership and its explicit links to a far from dormant colonialism. It inspires audiences to ask serious questions of the collective illusion we call progress.

2002 / 68 mins