The film is not just a literal scene of the ceremony. It actually takes the viewer through the experience of the ceremony. How did you approach filming that?
I think this is a very interesting aspect of this journey of the ayahuasca—that it’s a non-linear journey. It’s an overlaying experience. The way I shot it, and then editing it, was really to revisit this concept of how the memories are overlaying each other. How you have images and experiences of your own self and nature and everything, and suddenly you lose a border and everything overprints on top of each other. To go in such a short time from one emotion to another emotion, from one image to another image. It’s really like being in a washing machine, and you’re just spinning crazy fast. And this is where the icaros are so essential, because in the spinning, the icaros are the only rope that allow you to maintain some kind of balance or direction. Otherwise you just, you know, went crazy.

What was filming in the Amazon like?
[There’s] this idea that when you’re entering it, it’s not a friendly nature to romanticize about. It’s a cruel nature. It’s a beautiful and cruel nature at the same time. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced something like that in terms of how powerful the nature is. But it’s this amazing amount of sound that we never really experience anymore in cities or anywhere, especially at nighttime when all the animals and species—fish, alligators, birds of any kind—they start to hunt. You have all these millions of species hunting, and the forest plays an orchestration, a massive amount of sound all over the place.

Shamans are famously protective of their rites. How did they respond to your interest in filming these private things?
We’ve been working with Jeremy Narby, he’s been going there for twenty-five years. He’s the most well-known person in this field. I’d met a few shamans before that in different places. It has been preparing, taking a year or two of pre-production.

What is the Soundwalk Collective?
We’re very interested in invisible sound, sound that you cannot hear or sound that has disappeared, and reconnecting it. We spent the last two years in the Mediterranean Sea retracing the journey of Odysseus, and then on the Black Sea retracing the journey of the Argonauts and Medea. On the boat we had scanners, and we would be collecting all the sounds that would be flying over the CB, and then out of them we create some kind of musical piece. We also crossed the Rub Al Kali desert. We collected all the communication of the Bedouins through the desert. The beauty of these projects is that when you’re walking or you’re sitting there, you don’t hear anything. Meanwhile, you have millions of voices sharing, communicating.