Veins of the Amazon (2021)

• 72%
• 2021
• Documentary
• Álvaro Sarmiento Pagán
• Diego Sarmiento Pagán
• Luis Gil
• Piero Reátegui
• Saulo Peña

In the Peruvian Amazon, the main means of transport for goods and people since the times of the rubber boom and the infamous adventures of Fitzcarraldo are the ferries navigating the majestic Amazon River. In its crude harbors, porters work their fingers to the bone carrying tons of onions, sugar, oil, sodas, motorbikes, and building materials on their wet bodies to fill another ferry for the journey into the depths of the Amazon rain forest. The ferries bear products from the global market place in exchange with the exotic goods from the jungle. Yet the ferries also form a distinct space of transition for the travelers taking journeys that can last for weeks, for the crew who strip their sexual identities as well as for the indigenous people living on the edges of the Amazon. The Amazon floats in its timeless horizon of lush woods, too vast and too wild for human imagination to embrace this inaccessible world with care that it deserves. The observational documentary bears witness to the controversies in the axes of accelerating modernism and the hybrid states of local experiential realities on the world's largest river. The film follows the life cycle of one of the Amazon journeys, catering to the felt sense of the Amazon experience, at once disturbing yet stunningly beautiful.