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Released
2015 · FILM

Embrace of the Serpent

A reclusive Amazonian shaman must guide two desperate scientists through an unforgiving rainforest to locate a mythical healing plant, while confronting colonial greed and the fading memory of his vanished tribe.

“A poetic and haunting journey into a lost world.”

Directed by
Ciro Guerra
Written by
Theodor Koch Grunberg, Cristina Gallego
Runtime
125 min
Language
ES
AdventureBiographyDrama

Synopsis

The film presents the epic narrative of the first contact, encounter, approach, betrayal, and ultimately life-transcending friendship between Karamakate, an Amazonian shaman and last survivor of his people, and two scientists who, over the course of 40 years, travel through the Amazon in search of a sacred plant capable of healing them. The story is inspired by the journals of the first explorers of the Colombian Amazon, Theodor Koch-Grunberg and Richard Evans Schultes.

Credits

Actors
Editor
Production Designer
Director of Photography
Writers
Director

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How many hands made this film

The scale of the collaboration

Principal cast & crew: 19

These are the principals we have on file — the full crew ran to the hundreds. Every film this size was made by far more hands than any credits list ever names.

Why a floor?

This is a minimum, not a total. We only count the credits we’ve captured so far, and coverage is uneven — a blockbuster might show a few hundred names while another of the same size shows a couple dozen. The real crews all ran into the thousands. The number here only grows as full credits are enriched — so we frame it as a floor, never a headcount.

Craft leads on file

Edited by Etienne BoussacShot by David GallegoScored by Nascuy LinaresDesigned by Angelica Perea

Box Office

2015 · Box office

📉 Underperformed — grossed 0.9× its budget

Why 2.5×?

Cinemas keep roughly half of every ticket sold, and a wide release’s marketing often costs about as much again as the film — so a movie needs to gross around 2.5× its production budget just to break even theatrically. It’s a rule of thumb, not the studio’s ledger (home video and streaming come later).

Worldwide gross

$1.3M

Budget$1.4M
Worldwide gross$1.3M
break-even (2.5×)

Also known as

  • Der Schamane und die Schlangede
  • Embrace of the Serpenten
  • L'Étreinte du serpentfr

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