Bolívar played the old shaman in Embrace of the Serpent with a stillness that reads first as calm and then as grief. He was not a trained actor and he made one film that mattered; the film would be much less without him.
Fi1m perspective
The old Karamakate sits in the front of the canoe in Embrace of the Serpent (2015) and tells the American botanist that he is a chullachaqui, a hollow copy of a man who wanders the forest with no memories. Antonio Bolívar says it without self-pity, as if stating his age. It took us some time to understand that what looked like calm was grief, and when it landed it landed hard, because he had never once asked us to notice it.
Bolívar was not an actor. He was an elder from the Colombian Amazon, one of the last of his people, and a translator of languages including Tikuna and Cubeo. Ciro Guerra found him after seeing a short film he had appeared in more than a decade earlier and cast him opposite Nilbio Torres, who plays the young Karamakate in the film's other timeline. Torres has the fury; Bolívar has what is left when the fury has burnt out. We thought his the better performance and the sadder one, and we still do.
He had never been taught how to act, and the film does not need him to. When he speaks of the forest he is not pretending to know it. There is a dry humour in him too, a way of watching Brionne Davis's Schultes fuss over his notes with the patience of a man who has seen this before. Guerra and David Gallego photograph him in pewter black and white and he barely moves; the film's stillness is largely his.
He worked with Guerra once more, on the television series Green Frontier (2019), as Wilson Nai. He died in 2020. Two roles is not a career, and we will not pretend to trace phases in it. What we can say is that a performance of this kind cannot be repeated by anyone, including the man who gave it, because it comes from the life he had lived. He told an interviewer in 2016, "I didn't realise it would be so valuable, this work we did." Watch Embrace of the Serpent and you will realise it for him.
Biography
Antonio Bolívar was a Colombian actor and Indigenous Ocaina elder. He played the older Karamakate in the 2015 film Embrace of the Serpent, directed by Ciro Guerra, and appeared as Wilson Nai in the 2019 Netflix series Green Frontier.
Bolívar assisted with rewriting and translating the script for Embrace of the Serpent into several Indigenous languages. He was one of the last surviving members of his people and died on 30 April 2020 in Leticia, Colombia.
