The Jungle Prescription (now under the working title Medicine, for its feature-length version) is the result of a fifteen-year investigation into what traditional cultures know, and we have forgotten, about the most powerful plants on Earth. Used correctly, they are medicines; abused, they become poisons.
We began by documenting religious syncretism, and the ways in which indigenous peoples have protected themselves from acculturation by hiding their traditions inside the religions of their colonizers. This research invariably led us back to the original traditions themselves, and to that point in human history where medicine, psychology and religion were not separate fields.
We traveled to a dozen countries and three continents, filming otherworldly rituals, extraordinary behaviours that manifested something that seemed universal to all mankind. Robin joined our team, and we decided to focus on Amazonian curanderos, surviving heirs of an ancient indigenous tradition, and one of their medicines of choice: ayahuasca, a powerful decoction of two psychoactive plants.
In the past three decades, this Amazonian brew has gone from obscurity to international attention, entering the West through underground networks, syncretic ayahuasca churches, plane-hopping curanderos and inquisitive psychotherapists.
While other indigenous traditions we documented were slowly dying, interest in this peculiar soul-baring tea was expanding exponentially. When we began this research, there a handful of sites on the Internet with references to ayahuasca.
Today, there are millions.
Historically, when native plants such as tobacco, coca – or even cocoa – traveled to the West, they would lose their traditions of use on their way to us. These traditions are sets of norms that maximized the plant’s benefits, and minimized their risks. Instead of leveraging this knowledge, the West arrogantly tried to find their own ways to use these ancient plants, extracting their compounds and commercializing them as products – often misusing the plants as badly as indigenous populations had sometimes misused our liquor.
With ayahuasca, however, something different was happening. For the first time in history, an Amerindian sacred plant was expanding to the West, taking with it some of its traditional context and methods of use. It was as if the West was finally waking up to the idea that the people who had been using the plant the longest, were probably in the best position to teach us how it should be done.
There was one type of ayahuasca story that reappeared wherever we went. It was the story of people whose lives had taken a wrong turn, people who had fallen into compulsion, into patterns of behaviour destructive to themselves or those around them. For those people, the encounter with ayahuasca was not unlike hitting a mirror while running at full speed. Ayahuasca forced them to stop and look at themselves. It hurt. However, taking a long, hard look helped them turn around and stop destroying themselves. That is how ayahuasca works. It works by showing; by making people aware, like a mirror for our soul.
We understood we could make a film that not only paid homage to the richness of indigenous knowledge, but also showed how it can be put into practice, providing mutual benefits for all, if the exchange is reciprocal. There are not many examples of such interchanges in today’s world. Indigenous and Western cultures, both suffering from problems that are deep and complimentary, have the inherent potential to help one another heal.
This is why we felt it was so important that this story gets told.
We are extremely happy to be able to share with a wider audience some of the amazing encounters we recorded, in the process of making the film. The knowledge and wisdom that comes through them inspires us to this day.
-Jerónimo M.M, Mark Ellam, Robin McKenna
