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The Amazonian rainforest has always provided a home for the Shipibo as long as they can remember. Traditionally women tend the gardens while the men hunt and fish, Now fewer men hunt since less large animals survive under the diminishing jungle canopy. Since ancient times the Shipibos relied on their shamans for healing and guidance.

When the missionaries arrived ­everything changed. They were not just the mediators between the Shipibo people and God, but also between the shipibo and the modern world: technology, new diseases and pharmaceuticals, money—they all reached the tribes living in the interior of the forest through the missionaries. The shaman’s power was thus diminished and in many villages the tribal rituals were virtually abandoned.

During the Anisheati ceremony The Shipibo initiated the next generations into their ‘story’. Through song and dance, and puberty rites for girls they reaffirmed their tribal identity. The Anisheati ceremony was largely abandoned some forty years ago.

When we first drank the Ayahuasca together with the Mahua shamans, they communicated to us that it was their intention to perform the Anesheati ceremony and film it as record of the Shipibo ancestral life.

Despite warnings from the missionaries that the jungle would fill with demons, Junin Pablo a Shipibo village deep in the jungle along one of the thousands of branches of the Ucayali River, went ahead with the intricate preparations for the Anisheati ceremony, guided by the shamans.

Together, the people of Junin Pablo and the Mahua Shamans performed the Anisheati one last time…..

	Cry at the End of the 20th Century
About the movie