Shipibos Stories (2023)

Little Indian, Big City

Stephen, an international trader, tracks down his ex-wife Patricia in some Amazonian backwater. He needs her consent to a divorce so that he can marry Charlotte. Unfortunately, he discovers a son he didn’t know he had – Mimi-Siku. The young jungle boy yearns to see Paris so Stephen reluctantly agrees to take him back home with him for a few days. How will Mimi-Siku react to life in the great metropolis?

The Emerald Forest

For ten years, engineer Bill Markham has searched tirelessly for his son Tommy who disappeared from the edge of the Brazilian rainforest. Miraculously, he finds the boy living among the reclusive Amazon tribe who adopted him. And that's when Bill's adventure truly begins. For his son is now a grown tribesman who moves skillfully through this beautiful-but-dangerous terrain, fearful only of those who would exploit it. And as Bill attempts to "rescue" him from the savagery of the untamed jungle, Tommy challenges Bill's idea of true civilization and his notions about who needs rescuing.

Fitzcarraldo

Fitzcarraldo is a dreamer who plans to build an opera house in Iquitos, in the Peruvian Amazon, so, in order to finance his project, he embarks on an epic adventure to collect rubber, a very profitable product, in a remote and unexplored region of the rainforest.

Medicine Man

An eccentric scientist in the Amazon jungle rejects his research assistant for being a woman, but as bulldozers threaten their work on a potential cancer cure, they learn to collaborate and begin to fall in love.

Aguirre, the Wrath of God

A few decades after the destruction of the Inca Empire, a Spanish expedition led by the infamous Aguirre leaves the mountains of Peru and goes down the Amazon River in search of the lost city of El Dorado. When great difficulties arise, Aguirre’s men start to wonder whether their quest will lead them to prosperity or certain death.

The Lost World

The first film adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's classic novel about a land where prehistoric creatures still roam.

Fire on the Amazon

When a well-known environmental researcher is murdered in the Amazon jungle, an arrogant photojournalist joins forces with a beautiful young activist to find out who is responsible. Along they way, they fall in love as they discover the men responsible for the killing would be more than willing to murder again if it will keep them quiet.

Amazonia: The Catherine Miles Story

A young woman seeks vengeance and finds love when her parents are killed in the Amazon and she is taken prisoner by an indigenous tribe of headhunters.

Death in the Garden

In a remote Amazon jungle village, a group of angry diamond prospectors revolt when the local government undertakes a violent crackdown.

Back from Eternity

A South American plane loaded with an assortment of characters crash lands in a remote jungle area in the middle of a storm. The passengers then discover they are in an area inhabited by vicious cannibals and must escape before they are found. A remake of Five Came Back (1939).

El Dorado

The story of an expedition down the Orinoco and Amazon rivers in 1560 by Spanish soldiers searching for the fabled city of gold, El Dorado.

The Lost City of Z

A true-life drama in the 1920s, centering on British explorer Col. Percy Fawcett, who discovered evidence of a previously unknown, advanced civilization in the Amazon and disappeared whilst searching for it.

At Play in the Fields of the Lord

Martin and Hazel Quarrier are small-town fundamentalist missionaries sent to the jungles of South America to convert the Indians. Their remote mission was previously run by the Catholics, before the natives murdered them all. They are sent by the pompous Leslie Huben, who runs the missionary effort in the area but who seems more concerned about competing with his Catholic 'rivals' than in the Indians themselves. Hazel is terrified of the Indians while Martin is fascinated. Soon American pilot Lewis Moon joins the Indian tribe but is attracted by Leslie's young wife, Andy. Can the interaction of these characters and cultures, and the advancing bulldozers of civilization, avoid disaster?

Amazons and Gladiators

During the Roman Empire, General Crassius ruled a small province with an Iron fist. Serena, a young girl in a village, watches Crassius kill her parents. Crassius and Serena's destiny would lead them to the Gladiator ring; the Amazons Warrior vs the Roman General.

Amazonas

Composed by six films about the Amazon rain forest and its inhabitants, the high stakes, and the challenges they face. Each film presents a different perspective on a specific aspect of Amazonian culture.

Miracles Still Happen

A seventeen-year-old girl is the sole survivor of a plane crash in the Amazon.

Treasure of the Amazon

An adventurer and his buddies race a former Nazi and others to diamonds in the South American jungle.

A Child of the King

An American doctor establishes an orphanage in Ecuador to help the starving and homeless children of the Amazon rain-forest.

Iracema

A girl from the countryside goes to the city of Belém to take part in the Círio de Nazaré celebrations. Led to prostitution, she wishes to move to the wealthiest Southeast region of Brazil. In a dance club, she meets a truck driver that transports wood. Dreaming with the big city, she asks for a ride, and the two begin a journey through the Trans-Amazon road. In tension with the Brazilian military authorities of the time, the film registers several aspects of the Amazon social tragedy – forest fires, slave work and child prostitution. Awarded in several international festivals, the film was forbidden by the Brazilian censorship. It was only released years later, winning the Brasília Film Festival in 1981.

Embrace of the Serpent

The epic story of the first contact, encounter, approach, betrayal and, eventually, life-transcending friendship, between Karamakate, an Amazonian shaman, last survivor of his people, and two scientists that, over the course of 40 years, travel through the Amazon in search of a sacred plant that can heal them. Inspired by the journals of the first explorers of the Colombian Amazon, Theodor Koch-Grunberg and Richard Evans Schultes.

Five Came Back

Twelve people are aboard Coast Airline's flagship the Silver Queen enroute to South America when the airplane encounters a storm and is blown off course. Crashing into jungles known to be inhabited by head hunters, pilots Bill and Joe race against time to fix the engines and attempt a take off. The situation brings out the best and worst in the stranded dozen as they create a makeshift runway and prepare to escape before the natives attack. But damage to the plane and low fuel reserves means that only 5 people can be carried to safety.

The Awakening of Annie

The lovely orphan Annie is wandering St Tropez when she meets a mysterious photo-journalist, who convinces her to pose nude for him on the luscious beaches. Proud of her work as the photographer’s muse, Annie agrees to travel to Brazil with him to model nude. After her swarthy companion tries to force himself upon her, Annie flees into the arms of Hugo: another photographer, but one with a more gentle spirit. Hugo takes Annie on a fateful trip into the heart of the Amazon, where the danger and the passion heat up.

River of Desire

Three brothers find themselves sharing a home with the alluring new wife of the middle sibling. As they become infatuated with the same woman, a complex and enthralling tale ensues in this tropical paradise.

Jungle

In 1981, an enthusiastic young adventurer follows his dreams into the Bolivian Amazon jungle with two friends and a guide with a mysterious past. Their journey quickly turns into a terrifying ordeal as the darkest elements of human nature and the deadliest threats of the wilderness lead to an all-out fight for survival.

Islandia

Emilia, a young widow, is traveling by river to Islandia with her young daughter, Irina, in the 1950s. Because the river is low, they are stranded in Santos, a small town in the Peruvian Amazon. The time they spend there is enough to change the course of their lives. Emilia is the first teacher the town has had. Fifty years later, her legacy remains.

Love Slaves of the Amazons

A party of explorers in the Amazon jungle are captured by a tribe of women, and learn that they are to be used as the tribe's "love slaves."

The Last Forest

In powerful images, alternating between documentary observation and staged sequences, and dense soundscapes, Luiz Bolognesi documents the Indigenous community of the Yanomami and depicts their threatened natural environment in the Amazon rainforest.

Home Is Where Your Heart Is

Axel is Dutch Surinamese, but after 20 years of living in the Netherlands he has become 100% Dutch. He has married a Dutch girl, Victoria, and has never been back. When his free-spirited mother Gladys summons the family to her guesthouse in Surinam for Christmas and an important announcement, Axel, his wife and her sister Mirna reluctantly make the journey. They have barely arrived when the situation gets completely out of hand, with his brother Virgil winding him up and his daughter Wonnie, who is doing an internship in Paramaribo, admitting that she is pregnant...

Icaros

Icaros explores the spiritual universe of the Shipibo indigenous people who live by the Ucayali river, one of the main tributaries of the Peruvian Amazon. Young Mokan Rono sets outs on a journey to discover the ancestral knowledge of ayahuasca, mentored by a wise shaman and by his mother, a master healer.

buen vivir – ñutse canseye

Oil extraction in the Amazon region is contaminating the land and water of a natural paradise. A slow process that threatens the health and traditional culture of local communities. Thirteen women raise their voices against the destruction of their land. Through protests and silent resistance, they confront an opaque global power structure.

Mata

Faced with the advancement of eucalyptus plantations, a farmer and an indigenous community stand as resistance and reveal the impact of monoculture on the environment, in contrast to traditional ways of life. The enemy can also be green.

The Shaman & Ayahuasca: Journeys to Sacred Realms

Filmed in the jungles of Peru, shaman Don Jose Campos introduces the practices and benefits of Ayahuasca, the psychoactive plant brew that has been used for healing and visionary journeys by Amazonian shamans for at least a thousand years.

The Relic

A homicide detective teams up with an evolutionary biologist to hunt a giant creature that is killing people in a Chicago museum.

Teatro Amazonas: The Art of Sound and Nature

The history of the Teatro Amazonas in Manaus, an opera house located in the middle of the Amazon rainforest, whose construction, between 1884 and 1896, depended on the labor exploitation of the local indigenous populations, provides an insight into the cultural, social and political situation in Brazil.

The Rundown

When Travis, the mouthy son of a criminal, disappears in the Amazon in search of a treasured artifact, his father sends in Beck, who becomes Travis's rival for the affections of Mariana, a mysterious Brazilian woman. With his steely disposition, Beck is a man of few words -- but it takes him all the discipline he can muster to work with Travis to nab a tyrant who's after the same treasure.

Cannibal Holocaust

A New York University professor returns from a rescue mission to the Amazon rainforest with the footage shot by a lost team of documentarians who were making a film about the area's local cannibal tribes.

Anaconda

A 'National Geographic' film crew is taken hostage by an insane hunter, who takes them along on his quest to capture the world's largest — and deadliest — snake.

Dr. Cyclops

Four explorers are summoned to Peru by the brilliant physicist Dr Thorkel. They discover a rich source of radium and a half-mad Thorkel who shrinks them down to one-fifth their normal size when they threaten to stop his unorthodox experimentation.

Perlimps

Claé and Bruô, secret agents from enemy Kingdoms of the Sun and the Moon, must overcome their differences and combine forces to find the Perlimps and infiltrate into a world controlled by Giants where war is imminent.

Frankenstein Island

A hot air balloon crew and a dog find themselves on an island with scantily-clad part-alien women, zombies, and other monsters.

Golden Goddess of Rio Beni

An aviator of a commercial line disappears in the Brazilian jungle. Two friends organize an expedition to find him. As if there were not enough dangers in the Amazon, three members of the expedition have another goal: to steal a golden goddess.

That Man from Rio

French military man Adrien Dufourquet gets an eight-day furlough to visit his fiancée, Agnès. But when he arrives in Paris, he learns that her late father's partner, museum curator Professor Catalan, has just been kidnapped by a group of Amazon tribesmen who have also stolen a priceless statue from the museum. Adrien and Agnès pursue the kidnappers to Brazil, where they learn that the statue is the key to a hidden Amazon treasure.

The Warrior's Husband

The Warrior's Husband is a satire of the male and female roles in society set in 800 B.C.. Queen Hippolyta (Marjorie Rambeau) rules Pontus with masculine authority; in fact, it is the women of Pontus who do all the laboring, fighting, and governing. Hippolyta's husband Sapiens (Ernest Truex) is truly a sissy of the first order, and is not unlike most of Pontus' male inhabitants.

The Last Shaman

James, giving himself 12 months before he has "a license to kill himself," sets off to the Amazon rainforest with hopes of finding a shaman who can save his life.

The Return

It’s spring in the Ecuadorian Amazon and the Uyantza festival is underway with the community celebrating all that the forest has to offer. Meanwhile, news is breaking around the world that a novel virus is spreading and a state of emergency is declared across the country. As people test positive for COVID-19 in the community, some families decide to leave and head deeper into the jungle. Disconnected from school, friends, the internet, and work, one family learns to reconnect with life in the forest. The children begin to unlearn the national curriculum, and instead are taught Indigenous knowledge that mainstream schools normally pass over. As COVID-19 wreaks havoc around the planet, the family reconnect to their ancestral ways, but as news arrives that Ecuador’s lockdown will end soon, will the family choose to return?

Extinction

Deep in the Amazon jungle a group of scientists are on a dangerous mission. When their guide suddenly abandons them, they find themselves in a savage and hostile environment. However, things turn deadly when they find they are in the middle of a hunting ground for a pack of prehistoric predators long thought extinct.

Creature from the Black Lagoon

When scientists exploring the Amazon River stumble on a “missing link” connecting humans and fish, they plan to capture it for later study. But the Creature has plans of his own, and has set his sights on the lead scientist's beautiful fiancée, Kay.

Revenge of the Creature

In a tributary of the Amazon, a monster – half-man, half-fish – is captured and placed in a reservoir in a Florida national park to be observed by scientists.

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.