In 2010, Canadian filmmaker Richard Meech spent time at a healing center in the Peruvian Amazon making Vine of the Soul: Encounters with Ayahuasca, a fifty two minute documentary following a naturopathic doctor and an accountant as they travel from Canada to drink ayahuasca under guidance they did not grow up with.
The film centers a real relationship rather than a generic jungle backdrop. One of its subjects is taught how to work with the medicine in a ceremonial way by a Shipibo Master, and the film names him: Guillermo Arevalo, known in his own community by his Shipibo name, Kestenbetsa. Arevalo was born in 1952 in Yarinacocha and has spent decades as a vegetalista, a traditional plant medicine practitioner, co founding an organization in 1982 to bring Shipibo Conibo healing practice into wider Peruvian health care before going on to run his own center.
Meech's camera stays outside the ceremony in the way that matters here. It records the setting, the preparation, the aftermath and the words of the people involved, including Arevalo himself, rather than reproducing kene, the geometric visionary designs the Shipibo Conibo consider living, attributed works passed down through named artists. Nothing in the film stands in for a kene, and nothing here claims to either.
What the documentary offers is closer to reportage than devotion: an outside filmmaker's honest account of what two Canadians experienced under a Shipibo healer's guidance, with that healer identified, named and given his own words rather than folded into an anonymous jungle mystique.