The Kogi are the last surviving civilization from the time of the Inca and Aztec. They inhabit a mountain in the remote Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta Mountains of Colombia, an isolated triangular pyramid climbing more than 18,000 feet from the sea. The highest coastal mountain on Earth, the mountain and its watershed form a unique microcosm of the planet, representing most ecological zones and including habitats in which most of the plants and animals of the Earth can survive.
In 1990, the Kogi emerged from isolation to send a message to humanity via BBC filmmaker Alan Ereira, who directed From the Heart of the World: the Elder Brother’s Warning. Their message was that we are destroying life on Earth and ensuring our own demise if we don’t awaken and change our ways. Though that film had a dramatic global impact, humanity failed to heed the warning.
In 2008, the Kogi again contacted Alan Ereira, asking him to return to their village, train an Indigenous film crew, and work with them to try again to communicate with the rest of us. They wanted to show us that the physical planet is embedded in consciousness they call Aluna; that she has life and awareness and, as a result, experiences what we do to her. Baffled that “civilized” humans don’t understand this, they conduct a demonstration that is the centerpiece of the film: they lay a 248-mile-long golden thread from their mountain home through disappearing forests, shrinking estuaries, and down to polluted beaches–a microcosm for the planet as a whole—so that we can understand the delicate interconnections linking all parts of the natural world. What happens in one place has direct and specific consequences on what happens in another; the golden thread is real.
A key message of the film ALUNA is to protect the rivers because they are fundamental in maintaining life. “One of the most striking bits of the film,” Ereira says, “is the way they talk about how rivers function. They are absolutely adamant that the source of the river is affected by what you do at the estuary. That’s not the way we look at it; we don’t have that information. But that view is now beginning to be accepted by many river scientists.”
There is more to the Kogi’s message than that, however. They hope to convince us that when we destroy life on the planet, we are “dumbing down” consciousness, destroying not just the physical structure, but the thought underpinning existence. Matter is thought made manifest and planet Earth is the thought of the Mother. Although the Kogi believe that their purpose is to care for the world and keep its natural order functioning, their task is being made impossible by our mining, deforestation, habitat destruction, and greed. This is not a happy direction for a planet.
One of the Kogi’s ambitions for the film is that humanity will criminalize ecocide. “They feel we need to give our care of the Earth a basis in law, rather than emotion,” Ereira says. “We need to make it illegal to kill an ecosystem.”
ALUNA is available for purchase ($20) online in Western Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Scandinavia. It can also be watched in its entirety for free on YouTube.
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