Shot almost entirely in black and white, the film follows two journeys made thirty years apart by the indigenous shaman Karamakate in the Colombian Amazonian jungle, one with Theo, a German ethnographer, and the other with Evan, an American botanist, both of whom are searching for the rare plant yakruna.

He travels with two scientists, firstly with the German Theo von Martius in 1909 and then with an American named Evan in 1940, to look for the rare yakruna, a (fictional) sacred plant.

[4] Theo, an ethnographer from Tübingen who has already been residing in the Amazon for several years, is very sick and is travelling by canoe with his field notes and a westernised local named Manduca whom he had saved from enslavement on a rubber plantation.

Karamakate prolongs his life, blasting white powder called "the sun's semen" (possibly a hallucinogenic made from virola[5]) up his nose, but is reluctant to become involved with a westerner and refuses his money.

In 1909, we are left with Theo, sick and having fled the Mission, arriving at a frontier post just about to be invaded by Colombian soldiers during the Amazon rubber boom, where the sacred yakruna is being abused by drunken men, and cultivated, against local traditions.

In 1940, Karamakate does show Evan the origin of the plant in striking denuded dome-shaped mountains (Cerros de Mavecure), allegedly the home of yakruna.

Through watching a film over 10 years ago in a workshop with Colombia's Ministry of Culture, Guerra was able to find the perfect actor, Antonio Bolívar.

Bolívar's two minute presence in the short film had a great impact on Guerra, encouraging him to pursue appointing him the role of Karamakate as "There was nobody else that could play this guy.

[citation needed] The indigenous peoples are shown to have suffered at the hands of colonizers, and Colombian film critic and author Pedro Adrián Zuluaga states that Guerra highlights this by "shooting peripheric geographies... and bringing to the centre of the narrative an unavoidable contradiction between progress and tradition".

[8] The black and white cinematography bears similarity to the daguerreotype photography of early twentieth-century explorers who initially documented the Amazon and inspired the film.

They discovered a part of the jungle in the north west that had not yet been heavily affected by tourism or commerce and after gaining permission from the local community, they decided on the location.

To avoid any problems caused by the harsh environment, the indigenous people taught the crew how to work with the jungle and performed rituals for spiritual protection.

[12] Location details include: The soundtrack album of the movie was released by Plaza Major Company on 22 January 2016 and contains nine songs composed by Nascuy Linares.

The site's critical consensus reads, "As rich visually as it is thematically, Embrace of the Serpent offers a feast of the senses for film fans seeking a dose of bracing originality".

[16] Jordan Mintzer of The Hollywood Reporter described the film as "a visually mesmerizing exploration of man, nature and the destructive powers of colonialism" and compared it to Miguel Gomes' Tabu (2012).