Thursday, April 9, 2026 at 7:30 PM
Brain Dead Studios, Los Angeles
Myth, knowledge, and sacred indigenous plants are at the center of these two films. In each film, the landscape and its flora is at once sublime and fragile. For his dreamlike abstract short FAINTING SPELLS, filmmaker Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) creates an origin myth poem for the medicinal flowering plant Xąwįska, also known as the Indian pipe plant or the ghost flower, traditionally used to revive those who have fainted. In Ciro Guerra’s feature film EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT, Amazonian shaman Karamakate encounters two different Western scientists (at two different stages of his life), each seeking the sacred hallucinogenic Yakruna plant. Through poetic storytelling and hypnotic imagery, both films examine themes of cultural identity, loss, and reconnection to the spiritual world in the face of colonialism and destruction. ### EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT 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. ### FAINTING SPELLS *Director:* Sky Hopinka *Run Time:* 11 mins *Format:* DCP *Release Year:* 2018 Told through recollections of youth, learning, lore, and departure, this is an imagined myth for the Xąwįska, or the Indian Pipe Plant – used by the Ho-Chunk to revive those who have fainted.