Amazon (IMAX)

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Nature Documentary hosted by Linda Hunt and published by IMAX in 1997 - English narration

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Flowing out of towering mountains and descending into vast rain forests, South America's Amazon is one of the world's largest, longest rivers. But it's also a human community and complex ecosystem with consequences for the whole world.

This documentary follows Mamani, a tribal shaman, as he leaves his village in the Andes to seek new herbal cures and ingredients in a faraway market. Along the way he encounters and befriends strange tribes, beholds parts of the Amazon he'd never seen before, and ultimately trades his flute and some precious glacial water for the herbs and passage back home.

Mamani (actually a fictional character, played by an actor) is paralleled by the real-life Dr. Mark Plotkin, an ethnobotanist on a quest of his own. He hopes that the ecology of the dense jungle around the Amazon and its scattered, insular human tribes will lead to the discovery of natural cures for mankind's most pernicious diseases.

Amazon sets sail with a promise to debunk pulp-fiction myths about the legendary river, and there's a grainy clip of an old-timey Indiana Jones-type adventure, showing a white explorer fighting against hostile cannibals, killer crocodiles, and ferocious piranha. It's a great IMAX moment when the black-and-white stock footage gives way to the beautiful, hyper-real widescreen 70mm imagery of waterfalls, jaguars, Inca ruins, tramp steamers, and railroads winding through the mountains.