Friday March 28 8.30 pm
In 1992, filmmaker Dean Jefferys travelled to the headwaters of the Amazon in Ecuador to document the struggle of the tribal peoples against the oil companies and the encroaching outside world.
Now, Dean has returned to the Amazon with his pregnant partner and one-year-old daughter to chronicle the ancient and mysterious world of hallucinogenic shamanic rituals. Dean also travels around the world to discover how these shamanic rituals are being adapted into Western cultures.
In the presence of a trained shaman, Jefferys drinks the brew, known as ayahuasca – a combination of two hallucinogenic plants - which is said to allow the shaman to enter other dimensions where complicated healings, shamanic battles, clairvoyance, initiations, exchange of ancestral knowledge and communications with the plant, animal and spirit world are possible. The program utilises the latest in computer graphics technology to simulate the feelings and visions induced by the ayahuasca. Paintings by Amazon shaman and artist, Pablo Amaringo, also express the visions received during the ayahuasca trip.
Some contemporary shamans are using ayahuasca to determine their strategies to fight the oil companies and other invaders on their traditional land. The documentary shows a dramatic and violent uprising by thousands of Ecuadorian Amazon people against an American oil company which is polluting the local rivers.
Meanwhile, in Amsterdam, Jefferys meets Yatra Silvera de Barbosa, a Brazilian woman in her 40s who has been conducting rituals and importing ayahuasca into the Netherlands since 1994, to be used in a program to help heroin users to quit their addiction. Yatra describes the police raid of the Santo Daime Church in Amsterdam where ritual leaders are now facing between 7 and 15 years in jail for drinking and serving ayahuasca. The program also shows the first ever public demonstration to legalise ayahuasca.
The film examines the chemical composition of this shamanic brew and reveals that an active ingredient of the potion dimethltriptamine (DMT) can be extracted from Australian acacia or wattle trees. One of the key players in the documentary is world-renowned psychedelic explorer, lecturer and author, Terence McKenna, who has been experimenting with DMT since the 60s. Four months before he died of cancer Jefferys interviewed him at his home in Hawaii.
Shamans of the Amazon shows how the ayahuasca rituals are an integral part of the shamans’ life and their relationship with nature. At a time when indigenous people, their culture and the natural environment are experiencing dramatic changes, Dean Jefferys has examined what the shamans and their rituals have to offer.
An SBS Independent production
Related SBS Website : http://www.sbs.com.au/whatson/
http://www.sbs.com.au/whatson/index.php3?id=175
