The Museum of Modern Art has featured the 2017 Peruvian documentary film Green River: The Time of the Yakurunas / Río verde: el tiempo de los Yakurunas as a recommendation to watch as part of the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, taking place this Wednesday, April 22.
The film directed by Diego and Álvaro Sarmiento had its New York premiere as part of MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight film festival, and is now featured in the museum’s online magazine under the banner “Portraits of a Fragile Planet.”
Guided by ayahuasca chants, Green River is a poetic journey into the depths of the Amazon. The documentary explores the perception of time in three small villages intertwined by the flowing waters of the Amazon river, immersing the viewer in a landscape inhabited by shamans and archetypical societies. This hybrid narrative depicts the bodies of native elders to evoke the ghosts of rubber colonialism at the end of XIX century, the memory of ancient indigenous cultures still alive, but in danger of disappearing as a consequence of global capitalism.
