Taytacha* will give you hell!

The missionary teacher, a white-skinned, blonde-haired, and blue-eyed woman, tries to teach her students Spanish and English words she writes on the board: "As you can see, they're not that different, are they? Montana-mountain, Rio-river, Volcan-volcano..."

On the blackboard behind him are other word pairs like "sol-sun," "flor-flower," and "lago-lake." The students repeat the English versions of the words aloud, confirming the teacher's point about how closely related Spanish and English are. But no one mentions "Kichwa." Neither the teacher nor the students point out that Spanish is not the native language of the people living in this village at the foot of the Andes, but rather that it has been forced upon them over the last five centuries of colonial history. We hear "Kichwa," the native language of the Ecuadorian indigenous people—or "Quechua," as a version made famous in recent years by a sports brand—when elders seek help from the local shaman for back pain and in his prayers. So, for the director, this language holds no historical significance.

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Shaman (2025) takes place in such a cultural landscape. Released last week, the film tells the story of Candice and Joel, a couple who have traveled all the way to Ecuador with their teenage son to spread God's kingdom in the sky among non-believing—or rather, perverse—primitives.

While the couple is conducting a mission with the local Catholic priest, their son Elliot is possessed by an evil spirit. Candice, the mother, is the first to notice, but she can't convince anyone that her son is possessed. Finally, when the son begins screaming, black liquid pouring from his mouth and eyes, thanks to clumsy visual effects—the film's budget must have spared almost no effort for effects, as we watch the same sinister effect unfold throughout—the priest and father are convinced, and an exorcism is performed.

But they fail, and when the demon inside Elliot insists, "Your god has no power here!" Candice begins to suspect the shaman has cast a spell on her son. It later turns out that this is not the case, and that the child can only be saved thanks to the shaman and his primitive beliefs.

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This bad movie, which bores me to death even as I write about it, starts with a typical 'post-colonialist' intellectual foundation: Let's show the social and individual wounds inflicted by colonialism, and also tell the hardships and difficulties experienced after colonialism 'officially' ended and the colonists left us alone, the difficulties in the reconstruction process...

But, perhaps because the young Colombian director Antonio Negret owes almost his entire career to Hollywood and especially TV series, a sketchy, even rather sickly narrative emerges:

We're in a village at the foot of the Chimborazo volcano. A white-skinned missionary couple and a half-Spanish priest are baptizing the natives who have found the righteous path. Meanwhile, the missionary couple's son, Elliot, is playing with two native children on the other side of the slope. The children are holding figures carved from stone or wood as toys, while Elliot holds a model glider. After the director emphasizes this difference, as if to emphasize it, the boy launches the glider and follows them.

The glider, which resembles a Christian symbol, naturally flies in the wrong direction; it enters a cave that the natives consider taboo and therefore avoid. Elliot, who follows the glider, ignores the children's warning and dives into the cave, finding his "trouble."

In fact, it's quite complicated: The person the boy encountered in the cave and fled from in fear is the shaman who will later perform a ritual in the same cave to save the boy... In other words, the director attributes both the calamity and the cure to the shaman character. But the first victim of the "calamity"—the demon Supay that haunts Elliot—is, for some reason, the village's wise old woman.

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This is a typical "wounded consciousness" film: an "orientalist far-west" story told by a mentality that, as the famous Anatolian saying goes, "cannot stand between two mosques", by isolating the society from which it emerged from history...

When the director flies the white kid’s glider into a cave at the foot of a volcano in Ecuador, he quickly turns those naive like me on the wrong side of the fence, thinking, “Interesting! I guess he’s going to construct a critique through ‘unequal development’…” and reduces a social history woven with deep exploitation relations to very crude religious and metaphysical distinctions – let’s look at the language education scene again here: Among the students, most of whom are children, there is also a middle-aged man. When he asks, “What about Dios?” the teacher replies with some hesitation: “These two don’t look very similar: ‘Dios-god’.”

So, this is it... The US-Ecuador co-production of a director who was born and raised in Bogota, Colombia, and later made the leap to Hollywood ends, and I stare at the screen, brooding: I wonder if there are any words in common between English and Kichwa?

*Taytacha: 'god' in Kichwa language.