Writer/Director Rak Razam and Co-Director/Cinematographer/Editor
Timothy Parish have succeeded in giving a very true and exciting portrait of
the Amazonian plant medicine ayahuasca in their excellent documentary Aya: Awakenings.
I didn’t know if it would be possible to give an accurate
feeling for the ayahuasca experience on film, but Razam and Parish have done
it. Better yet, their portrait is honest, in
keeping with the true spirit of the plant’s usage, which has, too often, been
sensationalized by those seeking it only for a psychedelic high.
What the filmmakers bring out, which was most astonishing
to me, when I went on my own expeditions to Peru, is that the revival of the
plant’s usage has been brought about due to the interest of Westerners. The sad reality of the Amazon peoples is that
they were pulled from many different areas by force to work in the 19th
and 20th century rubber plantations.
As a result, the subsequent generations of these peoples had, for the
most part, lost their cultural identities.
What’s more, indigenous shamans were not, usually, local and one had to
await a traveling shaman or go, sometimes, as much as a hundred miles to find
one. And, unfortunately, many took advantage of the native people. As a result, they fell out of favor and they
and their medicines became distrusted until the presence of Westerners and
their interest seemed, now, to put a stamp of approval on them.
The film concentrates primarily on the initial level of
the ayahuasca experience, that of “cleansing,” and only touches on the second
level of “healing” before turning to a segment on the DMT experience. I wished that, instead of this segment, it
would have delved into the subsequent levels of the plant experience, the
raising of the users “vibratory level” and, finally, “connection” to all. But, perhaps, those are levels the filmmakers have yet
to experience and we can hope for a sequel.
Nonetheless, this film is a very valuable piece of
learning on the subject and gets across the fact that the true experience has
as much to do with the shaman one works with as with the medicine itself. What’s more, it is, ultimately, a spiritual
experience. This fact is most often lost
on “naturalists” such as the wag in the discussion group following the film,
who didn’t understand the difference between a drug and a medicine.
If the subject is of interest to you, I urge you to see it.
I give Aya: Awakenings a 4 out of 5.
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