A camera cannot film a spirit. It can only film the people who go looking for one, and what that search costs them.
The best films about shamanism are Manshin: Ten Thousand Spirits, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Embrace of the Serpent, Dersu Uzala, The Shamans of the Blind Country, The Great Dance, Ayahuasca: Vine of the Soul and The Last Shaman. Together they cover Korea, Siberia, Nepal, the Kalahari and the Amazon, and they split cleanly into two kinds: careful ethnographic documentary, and narrative film that takes the material seriously. Neither kind is the same as the fantasy “shaman” you meet in video games and animated features, and this list keeps that line visible on purpose.
I get asked for a watch list more often than almost anything else, usually by people who have just read something about what shamanism is and want to see it rather than only read about it. Most “shaman movies” lists online are padded with fantasy films that have nothing to do with any real practice, which does a disservice to the actual traditions. So I went looking for the films I would actually recommend, the ones made by people who did the fieldwork or took the subject seriously, and left out anything I could not vouch for.
That meant cutting several titles that show up on other lists but that I either could not verify or that blur shamanism together with unrelated traditions. A shorter, honest list is more useful than a long, padded one. Here are the eight I would actually put in front of a student.
| Film | Region / tradition | Type |
|---|---|---|
| Dersu Uzala (1975) | Siberia (Nanai hunter) | Narrative |
| The Shamans of the Blind Country (1980) | Nepal | Ethnographic documentary |
| The Great Dance (2000) | Kalahari (San) | Documentary |
| Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) | Palaeolithic Europe | Documentary |
| Embrace of the Serpent (2015) | Colombian Amazon | Narrative |
| Ayahuasca: Vine of the Soul (2010) | Peruvian Amazon | Documentary |
| The Last Shaman (2016) | Peruvian Amazon | Documentary |
| Manshin: Ten Thousand Spirits (2013) | Korea | Documentary |
1. Dersu Uzala follows a Siberian hunter who reads the forest as alive.
Akira Kurosawa’s 1975 Soviet-Japanese co-production, winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, is not a film about a shaman by job title. It follows Dersu, a Nanai hunter and guide in the Siberian taiga, who speaks to the fire, the river and the tiger as persons rather than as scenery. That worldview, that everything is alive and owed a relationship, is the exact ground that Siberian shamanism grows out of, and Kurosawa films it without a hint of condescension.
It is also simply a beautiful, patient film, closer to a character study than an adventure. If you want to feel the landscape that gave the word “shaman” to the world before you read a single definition of it, start here.
2. The Shamans of the Blind Country documents Nepalese shamans without narrating over them.
Anthropologist Michael Oppitz spent years with Magar shamans in a remote valley of Nepal before making this 1980 documentary, and it shows. There is very little explaining voice-over telling you what to think. Instead you watch full ceremonies: drumming, trance, the recitation of origin myths, healing work for specific patients, shot at a length most modern documentaries would never allow.
It is a demanding watch rather than an entertaining one, and that is exactly its value. You see the actual duration and repetition of real ceremonial work, not a highlight reel built for an audience.
3. The Great Dance turns the camera on San trance healers in the Kalahari.
This 2000 documentary follows San hunters and healers in the Kalahari desert, and its centrepiece is the trance dance: hours of rhythmic clapping, singing and dancing that carries a healer into an altered state in which they are understood to draw out sickness from the people around the fire. It is one of the oldest continuously practised healing traditions on the planet, filmed with real access and real patience.
Watch it alongside the Siberian material and the pattern becomes hard to miss: unrelated peoples, continents apart, independently arriving at rhythm and trance as the technology for the same job.
4. Cave of Forgotten Dreams takes you into the debate about where this all began.
Werner Herzog’s 2010 documentary about the Chauvet cave paintings, roughly 36,000 years old, is the one film on this list that is explicitly about a controversy rather than a settled practice. Herzog interviews the archaeologists who argue, following David Lewis-Williams, that the paintings record shamanic trance visions, and lets the uncertainty stay uncertain rather than resolving it for you.
I think that honesty is the film’s real gift. The idea that this art depicts shamanic practice is an interpretation, not a proven fact, and Herzog never pretends otherwise. It is a good corrective to the lazy “shamanism is 40,000 years old” claim you will still see repeated elsewhere online; the oldest burial that researchers widely read as a shaman’s is far younger, around 12,000 years.
5. Embrace of the Serpent puts an Amazonian shaman at the centre of the story, not the sidelines.
Ciro Guerra’s 2015 Colombian film follows Karamakate, the last survivor of his people, guiding two outsiders decades apart in search of a sacred healing plant. It is fiction, shot in black and white, and it is also one of the few narrative features where the shaman is the one with the authority, the knowledge and the grief, while the Western scientist is the one who does not understand what he is looking at.
It does not flinch from the damage colonial rubber extraction and missionary violence did to Amazonian peoples and their knowledge, which is part of why it is taken seriously rather than treated as exotic scenery.
6. Ayahuasca: Vine of the Soul stays close to the plant and the people who hold it.
This 2010 documentary follows curanderos and vegetalistas in the Peruvian Amazon working with ayahuasca within their own cultural framework, rather than following a Western visitor’s personal journey. The icaros, the sacred songs used to guide a ceremony, are given real screen time, which most ayahuasca documentaries skip past in favour of visuals.
If you only watch one film about plant medicine traditions, I would make it this one before any of the tourism-and-transformation documentaries that followed it.
7. The Last Shaman follows one young man’s healing, and its limits.
This 2016 documentary follows an American university student with severe depression who travels to the Peruvian Amazon to work with ayahuasca after conventional treatment failed him. Unlike the previous entry, this one is explicitly a personal journey film, and it is worth watching precisely because it does not promise a miracle. The process shown is slow, uncomfortable and only partially resolved by the film’s end.
I would pair it with a plain caution: this kind of plant medicine work carries real risk, it is not a replacement for psychiatric care, and the retreat industry it is set inside of is uneven in quality. The film itself is honest about that. Not every account of this journey is.
8. Manshin: Ten Thousand Spirits follows a real mudang across her whole life.
Park Chan-kyong’s 2013 documentary centres on Kim Keum-hwa, one of Korea’s most recognised mudang, weaving archival material, re-enactment and present-day ceremony into a portrait of a woman who was punished for her calling as a child and later named a holder of Korea’s Intangible Cultural Heritage. It is the clearest window available on film into what a kut ceremony and the life of a mudang actually look like, rather than how outsiders imagine them.
A plain note on fantasy “shamans” in movies and games.
You will also meet the word “shaman” constantly in fantasy media: an animated character like Tanana in Disney’s Brother Bear, or the shaman class in countless fantasy games and adventure films. None of that is a documentation of any real tradition, and none of it belongs on the same list as the films above. It borrows the word as a costume. There is nothing wrong with enjoying it as fiction, as long as it is not mistaken for an account of how actual practitioners, in Korea, Siberia, Nepal, the Kalahari or the Amazon, actually work.
Frequently asked questions about films on shamanism
Manshin: Ten Thousand Spirits is a strong starting point because it follows one real practitioner’s whole life rather than a single ceremony, which gives a beginner the human context that a shorter film cannot. The Great Dance is an equally good, gentler entry point into trance healing.
Embrace of the Serpent and Dersu Uzala are both fiction and both widely respected for taking their subjects seriously rather than using them as exotic backdrop. Most other fictional “shaman” characters in mainstream cinema are fantasy archetypes rather than accurate depictions.
Watching a documentary made with the consent and involvement of the practitioners shown, such as Ayahuasca: Vine of the Soul, is different from treating the ceremony itself as spectator entertainment. The concern is attending or filming a real ceremony as a tourist, not watching an honest documentary about one.
This list is limited to films that document or seriously depict a real shamanic tradition. Fantasy films borrow shamanic imagery for invented worlds, which is a different thing entirely and is addressed separately above rather than mixed into the main list.
Now it’s your turn.
Have you seen any of these, and which one stayed with you longest? And if you have found a documentary I have not mentioned here that genuinely belongs on this list, tell me in the comments, I would rather add a good one than pretend this list is finished. If watching these leaves you wanting to actually learn the practice rather than only watch it, the Elements of Shamanism training is where that starts.
About the author. Carolin Mallmann is a shamanic practitioner and teacher and the founder of One Shamanism. She trained in Mongolian and Siberian lineages and in Core Shamanism with the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, and teaches practitioners internationally.
Shamanic work supports, but does not replace, medical or psychological treatment.
