Antidote 2023

Antidote focuses on indigenous healers and their ancestral relationship to the Amazon rainforest, its spirit world and curing traditions. A group of foreigners arrive looking to recover from a variety of traumas. Using song, ceremony and ayahuasca, the most potent and transformative medicine of the Amazon, the healers begin their work. ​ They reveal how ayahuasca both cures and guides the mind, but warn against a self centred approach to healing. Amazonian cultures have suffered at the hands of Western ideologies, individualism and extractive industries, and the film explores whether the commodification of this sacred plant is a new type of exploitation: spiritual extractivism. ​ The foreigners learn that ayahuasca is medicine not just for individuals, but one that is used to heal history and the imagination – and humanity’s broken relationship with nature itself.

Antidote focuses on indigenous healers and their ancestral relationship to the Amazon rainforest, its spirit world and curing traditions. A group of foreigners arrive looking to recover from a variety of traumas. Using song, ceremony and ayahuasca, the most potent and transformative medicine of the Amazon, the healers begin their work. ​ They reveal how ayahuasca both cures and guides the mind, but warn against a self centred approach to healing. Amazonian cultures have suffered at the hands of Western ideologies, individualism and extractive industries, and the film explores whether the commodification of this sacred plant is a new type of exploitation: spiritual extractivism. ​ The foreigners learn that ayahuasca is medicine not just for individuals, but one that is used to heal history and the imagination – and humanity’s broken relationship with nature itself.