Other Worlds

While shooting a film, the director Jan Kounen met the Shipibo healers of the Peruvian Amazon and came upon the plant they hold sacred, ayahuasca. Affected by what he went through, he returned to make a documentary about the plant, the rite around it and the healers’ work. It is not only the indigenous healers who speak in the film but neurologists, philosophers, chemists and artists as well, so that the scientific side of the subject stands beside the side of belief. The account does not present this as a recommendation; the risks the plant carries are part of the film too. Jan Kounen’s seventy four minute French documentary was completed in 2004.