Antidote

Antidote focuses on indigenous healers and their ancestral relationship to the Amazon rainforest, its spirit world and curing traditions. A group of foreigners arrive looking to recover from a variety of traumas. Using song, ceremony and ayahuasca, the most potent and transformative medicine of the Amazon, the healers begin their work. They reveal how ayahuasca both cures and guides the mind, but warn against a self centred approach to healing. Amazonian cultures have suffered at the hands of Western ideologies, individualism and extractive industries, and the film explores whether the commodification of this sacred plant is a new type of exploitation: spiritual extractivism. The foreigners learn that ayahuasca is medicine not just for individuals, but one that is used to heal history and the imagination – and humanity’s broken relationship with nature itself.

What happens when a group of traumatized Westerners seeks healing from their pain deep in the rainforests of the Amazon? How can they release that trauma? Will their modern minds accept or reject the wisdom of the earth? In this film, a family of indigenous shamans guides the group with traditional healing songs and ceremonies – and with the most potent and transformative plant medicine in their world, ayahuasca. Along the way, the shamans bring us their ancestral relationship to the rainforest, which honors the interconnectedness of all. Their guides are the spirit world and its curing traditions. But is ayahuasca a cure? Is the commodification of the sacred just a new way to exploit? Amazonian cultures, as we see, have suffered at the hands of Western ideologies, individualism and extractive industries. Our group learns that the shamans’ approach to medicine is not individual. It heals humanity's broken relationship with nature itself.

Exploring ayahuasca, a medicine not just for individuals, but one that is used to heal history, imagination and humanity's broken relationship with nature itself.