Indigenous knowledge

www.antidote-documentary.com

Antidote focuses on indigenous healers and their ancestral relationship to the Amazon rainforest, its spirit world and curing traditions. A group of foreigners arrive looking to recover from a variety of traumas. Using song, ceremony and ayahuasca, the most potent and transformative medicine of the Amazon, the healers begin their work.

They reveal how ayahuasca both cures and guides the mind, but warn against a self centred approach to healing. Amazonian cultures have suffered at the hands of Western ideologies, individualism and extractive industries, and the film explores whether the commodification of this sacred plant is a new type of exploitation: spiritual extractivism.

The foreigners learn that ayahuasca is medicine not just for individuals, but one that is used to heal history and the 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