The film begins with a mesmerizing scene of the Amazon where the black-and-white work of Director of Photography David Gallego captures the dreamlike qualities of the forests and the waters. Standing on the shoreline is Karamakate (Nilbo Torres), a shaman who lives alone and is the one remaining survivor of a tribe wiped out by white invaders. In a memorable scene, we see his close connections with the natural world: he stands silently in a swarm of butterflies who seem to sense him as their companion. As he looks across the shimmering waters, a boat comes into sight carrying Theo (Jan Bijvoet) and his guide and close friend Manduca (Miguel Dionisio Ramos). Karamakate is told that the scientist is dying and only the Yakruna plant can save him.

Although the shaman hates all white men and at first refuses to help Theo, he changes his mind when he learns that the explorer has come across members of his tribe. Karamakate gives the sick man treatments: herbal medicine administered through a blowdart into the nose. But in exchange he insists that the Westerner act in accordance with a diet of no meat or fish. The wise shaman also counsels him to be courteous to plants and trees. This requires living in rhythm with the natural world rather than dominating it.

Some 30 years later, Evans (Brionne Davis) follows Theo’s path. The American has been recruited to find new sources of rubber for his country, at war with a Japan that controls Southeast Asia’s sticky sap. Evans is an expert on hallucinogenic plants and hopes to find yakruna. He enlists an older Karamakate (Antonio Bolivar), who believes he has lost his memory, and perhaps even his identity.  Karamakate’s wisdom mingles the practical, the ecological, and the mystical. To him, shooting stars become totemic animals, including the jaguar and the boa, which impart wisdom in dreams. He laughs, a generation apart, at Theo and Evans’ attachment to their possessions. He’s also amused by Theo’s songs, although suitably awed when Evans’ gramophone emits Haydn’s “The Creation.”

Such devices, which include the compass Theo loses to a village chief, are the white man’s magic. They are potentially corrupting, since they may supplant the local knowledge and cause even a shaman to forget who he used to be.

During the two quests, several episodes justify Karamakate’s contempt for European explorers and exploiters, who’ve oppressed indigenous peoples in the service of both rubber and Jesus. A stop at an orphanage run by a lone monk is as chilling an illustration of the white man’s jungle madness as Aguirre, the Wrath of God. And when Evans and Karamakate arrive at the same mission three decades later, the place has descended into a nightmare worthy of Apocalypse Now.