Filmic disciples and indigenous knowledges: The pedagogical imperative in El abrazo de la serpiente (Ciro Guerra, 2015)

The cinematic scene of instruction highlights forms of knowledge-transfer in films from Latin America, and crucially responds to different pedagogical motives. This article analyses different film ‘scenes’ and economies of learning in El abrazo de la serpiente (Ciro Guerra, 2015), making brief comparison in the conclusion with the pedagogical labor of the Indigenous filmmaking movement, which crafts a different spectatorial politics. Drawing not only on diegetic scenes of instruction from El abrazo but also on paratextual sources – the press kit, interviews, script and indeed other scholars’ published analyses of the film – I argue that the screened relationships in and across the film model forms of tutelage which shape the audience’s approach to ‘learning’.