5 years ago, with Priscilla Telmon, we started the "Híbridos" project - an experimental-ethnographic project documenting various forms of spiritual expressions and sacred music in Brazil. We chose to base ourselves in Brazil as we wanted to dig deeper in the 'spiritual meets artistic renaissance' of our generation and no other country have such a large array of approaches to the invisible as Brazil. The project gave birth to a large archival website, with more than 100 films, 75 digital albums and many texts by anthropologues - http://hibridos.cc - plus an ambitious, sensorial feature film - https://vimeo.com/hibridosbrazil - and many diverse 'expanded cinema formats' - including live cinema rituals that we are currently creating around the world, ideally always in public spaces open to nature - check that one for example we created for the Opus One festival - https://vimeo.com/253026796
This extract is taken from a longer film of the Híbridos project ( http://hibridos.cc/en/rituals/fraternidade-kayman ) on a rare and very artistic form of rituals that is sometimes called 'Umbandaime' - the name referring to the two main spiritual lines here mixed, Umbanda on one hand, an evolution of Afro-Brazilian ceremonies mixed with mediumnic knowledge of the Spiritist / Kardecist movement, and Santo Daime on the other, the nowadays famed 'Ayahuasca Church' which started in the 1920s in the Amazonian forest of Acre, merging indigenous knowledge and master plants with Catholic references and guidance.
The Fraternidade Kayman is a spiritual center who comes from Belo Horizonte, and follows the teachings of Pai João de Aruanda, an entity who expresses itself in a state of trance thru the body of Pierry Caetano, the head of the community. This ritual happened for New Year's Eve, by the sea near Rio de Janeiro, and involved many elements over more than 12 hours - in that sequence we can see a very unique set of incorporations related to animal spirits, where the mediums of the group enter in a state of trance guided by their totemic animal, while the original music calls for those entities to appear on a material plane. Needless to say, the western mind will lose its bearings there trying to understand the 'purpose' of such modified states of consciousness - after all, spirituality in a way teaches us to look at reality under a different angle and not look for clear-cut products of specific actions but more to the processes of transcendence themselves.