Aluna

Plot Summary

Over twenty years ago Alan Ereira’s influential television film From The Heart of the World: The Elder Brothers’ Warning brought global attention to the Kogi people of Colombia, a remote and ancient South American civilization determined to caution us about environmental damage to the earth. A true ‘lost civilization’ who regard themselves as the guardians of the earth, the Kogi once traded with the Mayans and Aztecs but survived the Spanish conquests by retreating into their isolated mountain massif, the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. Having remained hidden for centuries, the Kogi surfaced in Ereira’s original 1990 film with an environmental message that was ahead of its time, a warning about how we, their ‘younger brother’, were destroying the ecosystem by plundering the earth’s natural resources. But, despite this warning, the Kogi have continued to see destructive changes to their homeland as highways and power plants continue to spring up, with glacial melt, ferocious storms, landslides, floods, droughts and deforestation continuing to take their toll. Now, two decades later and convinced that their message has gone unheeded, the next generation of Kogi are reaching out to the world once more with a much more specific warning about the future of the planet. Filmed over three years, this ambitious feature-length documentary project initiated by the Kogi, with footage filmed by them, is the authentic voice of an indigenous people.