Kanarta Poster

Kanarta: Directed by Akimi Ota. With Pastora Tanchima, Sebastian Tsamarain. Sebastian and Pastora live in a Shuar village in Upper Amazonia of Ecuador. Sebastian is not only a respected healer, but also a medicinal botanist who experiments with unknown plants. His unique practice seeks to reinvent new knowledge that reconnects him to his ancestors. Pastora is one of the rare female leaders in Amazonia, who struggles to negotiate with local authorities for her community. With powerful plants such as ayahuasca, they revive and energise their perception of the future, while acquiring power and faith to cope with the obstacles they face, now that their life has been irreversibly affected by the modern state system. The alert eyes of the filmmaker embodied into the drifting camera creates a distinctive field of personal story-telling, inviting the viewers to the unique sensory experience of the life in Amazonia, where truths, meanings and images flow and take unpredictable shapes.