African Herbsmen: Healing and Religion along the Bight of Benin
2012 · 36m · Documentary
This film explores the integration of religion and plant-based medicine in an Ewe vodu community in southern Togo. A village priest healer, local ethnobotanists, and a religious marketeer guide us through the medicinal and religious uses of many local plants and herbs. Here in West Africa, plant-based medicines permeate spirituality and illness, and help protect the social order of the community.
More Like This
A Natural Way
Epic ground-breaking journey across India, China and Tibet to explore alternative medicine. With healthcare costs soaring in the west, looking east to alternative medicine is the answer. Now is the time to take the journey that will lead to better health – A Natural Way.
More info →
Becoming Black
2019 · ★ 6
In the 1960s, a white couple living in East Germany tells their dark-skinned child that her skin color is merely a coincidence. As a teenager, she accidentally discovers the truth. Years before, a group of African men came to study in a village nearby. Sigrid, an East German woman, fell in love with Lucien from Togo and became pregnant. But she was already married to Armin. The child is Togolese-East German filmmaker Ines Johnson-Spain. In interviews with Armin and others from her childhood years, she tracks the astonishing strategies of denial her parents, striving for normality, developed following her birth. What sounds like fieldwork about social dislocation becomes an autobiographical essay film and a reflection on themes such as identity, social norms and family ties, viewed from a very personal perspective.
More info →
Heaven Earth
2008
This documentary examines ayahuasca shamanism near Iquitos (a metropolis in the Peruvian Amazon), and the tourism it has attracted. The filmmakers talk with two ayahuasqueros, Percy Garcia and Ron Wheelock, as well as ayuahuasca tourists and local people connected with the ayahuasca industry.
More info →Sachamama
2010
Sachamama is a retreat lodge in Peruvian Amazonia. There, Francisco Montes leads ayahuasca ceremonies for tourists seeking insight and healing.
More info →
Aya: Awakenings
2013 · ★ 5
Aya: Awakenings' is an experiential journey by journalist Rak Razam into the world and visions of ayahuasca, a powerful hallucinogenic plant medicine from the Amazon, capturing the experience and the western dynamic around it in unprecedented detail.
More info →Qigong: Ancient Chinese Healing for the 21st Century
1999
This documentary introduces viewers to qigong, a 5,000-year-old method of cultivating and circulating the life energy called qi. It relates some of the history of qigong, as well as scientific evidence of efficacy. We also see qigong used in various contexts in modern China, and hear from Chinese doctors and qigong practitioners. The film was originally produced for the Public Broadcasting Service in the United States.
More info →
The Shaman & Ayahuasca: Journeys to Sacred Realms
2010 · ★ 4
Filmed in the jungles of Peru, shaman Don Jose Campos introduces the practices and benefits of Ayahuasca, the psychoactive plant brew that has been used for healing and visionary journeys by Amazonian shamans for at least a thousand years.
More info →
Shipibo: Learning Through the Light
2018
Shipibo healer Ricardo Amaringo describes how he prepares, teaches, and shares the plant medicine ayahuasca. Olivia and Julian Arévalo sing examples of icaros (healing songs) in the Shipibo language.
More info →Giraffe Dance / !Gwa Dance
2002
Men and women of the !Kung people in Ojokhoe, Namibia perform healing dances by firelight. First we see men perform the giraffe dance, and then women perform the !gwa dance.
More info →
Magie & Medizin - Die Geheimnisse des Papyrus Ebers
2023 · ★ 8.5
At around 3,500 years old, the Ebers Papyrus is the oldest completely preserved medical manual in the world. Recipes were written down here on 18.6 meters in ancient Egypt. When Georg Ebers set out in search of the scroll in 1872, its existence was questionable and its sensational condition only a rumor.
More info →