Rak Razam

Ron Wheelock

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.

In 1971, graduate student Gloria Orenstein received a call from Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington that sparked a lifelong journey into art, ecofeminism and shamanism. This short film uses art, animation and storytelling to celebrate this wild adventure. Now more than 40 years later, award-winning Dr. Gloria Feman Orenstein is a feminist art critic and pioneer scholar of women in Surrealism and ecofeminism in the arts. Her delightful tale brings alive an often unseen history of women in the arts.

James, giving himself 12 months before he has "a license to kill himself," sets off to the Amazon rainforest with hopes of finding a shaman who can save his life.

Faced with the advancement of eucalyptus plantations, a farmer and an indigenous community stand as resistance and reveal the impact of monoculture on the environment, in contrast to traditional ways of life. The enemy can also be green.

The history of the Teatro Amazonas in Manaus, an opera house located in the middle of the Amazon rainforest, whose construction, between 1884 and 1896, depended on the labor exploitation of the local indigenous populations, provides an insight into the cultural, social and political situation in Brazil.

This film dives into the world of Amazon, its story and view of the world. It offers a large social fresco backed up by an in-depth investigation where private lives meet the mega-machine.

It’s spring in the Ecuadorian Amazon and the Uyantza festival is underway with the community celebrating all that the forest has to offer. Meanwhile, news is breaking around the world that a novel virus is spreading and a state of emergency is declared across the country. As people test positive for COVID-19 in the community, some families decide to leave and head deeper into the jungle. Disconnected from school, friends, the internet, and work, one family learns to reconnect with life in the forest. The children begin to unlearn the national curriculum, and instead are taught Indigenous knowledge that mainstream schools normally pass over. As COVID-19 wreaks havoc around the planet, the family reconnect to their ancestral ways, but as news arrives that Ecuador’s lockdown will end soon, will the family choose to return?

Back in 2012 I had my very first Ayahuasca ceremony and, needless to say, I was terrified. But it ended up entirely changing my life and that of my future family.  Which is why I decided to revisit the medicine in 2018, participating in three Ayahuasca ceremonies over the course of one week in Costa Rica, and document the process.  In the film, we tackle my personal story of trying to build London Real into a global media and transformation company while also struggling with my own disconnection from friends, family and my own species.  We also dive deep into the division and tribalism currently facing all of us around the world.