Oscilloscope Pictures will release on Blu-ray Ciro Guerra's film Embrace of the Serpent (2015), starring Nilbio Torres, Jan Bijvoet, and Antonio Bolivar. The release will be available for purchase on June 21.
Embrace of the Serpent was Colombia's official entry in the Best Foreign Language Film category of the Academy Awards.
At once blistering and poetic, the ravages of colonialism cast a dark shadow over the South American landscape in Embrace of the Serpent, the third feature by Ciro Guerra. Filmed in stunning black-and-white, Serpent centers on Karamakate, an Amazonian shaman and the last survivor of his people, and the two scientists who, over the course of 40 years, build a friendship with him. The film was inspired by the real-life journals of two explorers (Theodor Koch-Grünberg and Richard Evans Schultes) who traveled through the Colombian Amazon during the last century in search of the sacred and difficult-to-find psychedelic Yakruna plant.