La Dieta - Healing with Plants in the Peruvian Amazon

This anthropological short film is based on research conducted in the Peruvian Amazon with a curandero (healer), a healer in practice and patients who come from Europe. The curanderos administer medicines made of barks, roots and leaves from local plants and trees to treat patients with physical, emotional or spiritual ailments within the framework of a dieta (diet). A dieta, in order to purify the body, encompasses the eating of grilled fish and cooked platanos (platains) or manioc. During the time period a patient stays in the camp, between 10 days to three months, the person is living in a hut with reduced social inputs and is going through a holistic process of healing. Based on the amazonian mestizo cosmology one is treated and taught by the espiritu curanderos (spirit healers of the plants) with which one gets in contact through the intake of the medicines. This portrait offers a sensory journey into this setting of healing and embeds the practice of la dieta cosmologically.