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Pacific Film Archive’s program “Psychedelia & Cinema”, curated by Kate MacKay, was organized with the support and participation of Tony Martin and Maya Acharya at the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics (BCSP), and—as outlined by MacKay—"presents a kaleidoscopic array of movies that explore expanded or enhanced consciousness, psychedelic experiences, and numinous encounters. Realized through psychoactive substances, meditation, deprivation, or other means, these experiences have been an important element of many cultures for millennia and have more recently become the object of scientific study, as well as being used for both therapy and recreation. Cinema, the 'Seventh Art,' is uniquely suited to explore altered and non-ordinary states of consciousness. From cinema’s earliest flickers to the present day, filmmakers have used techniques from montage to multiple exposures, lens distortion to animation and CGI, to create mystical visions and ecstatic journeys into inner and outer space.”
BCSP advances psychedelic discovery for the public good. The center supports rigorous, interdisciplinary inquiry and meaningful public pathways into science, journalism, applied research and policy, and the culture and community around psychedelics.
Included within the “Psychedelia & Cinema” line-up and screening Saturday, March 7, 2026, 7:00PM is one of the films I consider most memorable from this past decade: Ciro Guerra’s Embrace of the Serpent (El abrazo de la serpiente, 2015), introduced by Dr. Sylvestre Quevedo, Chairman of the Board and Scientific Director of the Open Mind Collective, San Francisco, and Research Physician, at the Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics, Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, UC Berkeley.
As laid out in BAMPFA’s program note: “Embrace of the Serpent centers on Karamakate, an Amazonian shaman and the last surviving member of his people, who assists two scientists, forty years apart, as they navigate the Colombian Amazon in search of the rare yakruna plant. The silky 35mm black-and-white cinematography lends the images—filmed over seven weeks with the cooperation of Indigenous communities in the jungles of Vaupés—a timeless quality. The film evokes the deep, ongoing consequences of colonialism, the fragility of Indigenous cultural knowledge, and the complex relationships between Western science, spirituality, and the natural world.”
Yakruna—albeit a fictional, sacred plant—serves as a central plot device in Embrace of the Serpent. It is portrayed as a rare, highly potent hallucinogenic plant sought by explorers for its healing and mystical properties. Inspired by the real-life diaries of explorers Theodor Koch-Grünberg and Richard Evans Schultes, yakruna is a conceptual creation derived from various psychotropic plants described in botanical journals, believed to cure illnesses, enable dreaming, and connect humans with nature at its roots. Yakruna represents a bridge between Western scientific pursuit and indigenous spiritual knowledge, as well as a symbol of the Amazonian ecosystem itself.
I had opportunity to watch Embrace of the Serpent yet again at the 38th edition of the Mill Valley Film Festival where Brionne Davis—the actor who portrayed Evan (the film's characterization of American ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes)—fielded questions from the film's festival audience.