Parity Pipeline

Genre

Synopsis

In ORQUIDEA, science and Indigenous knowledge cross-pollinate, revealing the key to multi-species survival in Colombia and on planet Earth. The film takes the shape of a volcanic mountain where a Cumbal elder spirit lives. After an ancient glacier melts due to climate change, everything changes. The Indigenous shape of the spirited mountain coincides with what Colombian conservation biologists call ‘the ecological corridor’ where any disturbance to altitude level on the mountain affects the cyclical nature of water for an entire nation. Meet a diverse group of unlikely conservationists: a group of guerilla ex-combatants who fight to protect the forest where orchids thrive, Indigenous elders who retell origin stories about the emergence of humans and orchids in jungles they safeguard, and biologists who study the capacity of orchid bees to reproduce a diversity of blooms that survive time. Their efforts in conservation are threatened by a precarious peace process and the unpredictability of water patterns oscillating between flood and drought, upending Indigenous forms of caring for the land and its flowers. The film is narrated from the point of view of Mama Juana, an ancestral spirit that lives in a nearby mountain. Mama Juana is also the elder spirit of one of our human protagonists, Mama Rosa, a healer from the Taramuel family line. The film encounters different human and non-human communities as it makes its way down a volcanic mountain named Cumbal, revealing shifts in ecosystems at different altitudes within Colombia’s Amazonic and Andean region. The mountain contains the ancestral spirit of an ancient woman cacique who founded the Indigenous people Cumbal. As the village shaman, Don Efren, states, “Cumbal is a person is a mountain is a shaman is a spirit is a people.” Inspired by local Indigenous cosmologies and conservation science in Colombia, ORQUIDEA is a poetic reflection on nature, power, and the passage of time.