Aluna is a 2012 feature-length documentary film sequel to the 1990 BBC documentary . The first documentary showed an ancient Kogi tribe civilisation who emerge to offer their concern for people of the modern world. Younger Brother is urged to change or suffer environmental disaster. After offering the warning the Kogi retreat to their community hidden in the mountains of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia. In the second documentary, the Kogis have re-emerged, realising that the importance of their warning had not been grasped. As well as warning Younger Brother they have decided to share their secret sciences in the belief that sharing these sciences will share their burden of changing the world for the better.
Content summary
Realising that their warning in 1990 was not fully grasped, the Kogis become more proactive. Even though their civilisation has never used wheels or created literature, they diligently study film cameras and train their own indigenous film crew. The Kogis ask Alan Ereira, whom they allowed to film their 1990 message, to assist. The Kogi Mamos decide that there will be "no more secrets". They want to demonstrate their planetary healing sciences in front of the cameras to the modern world and show visible and measurable results. They also wish to teach other people how to conduct these sciences in order to heal the world. They speak with modern scientists in the belief that they have a different science to show them.
Kogi demonstration
To help convince the modern world of the importance preserving the planet, the Kogi demonstrate its interconnectivity. A small group of Kogis travel to London, England to fetch 400 kilometres of gold thread, reportedly the longest ever made. Mama Shibulata, one of the Kogis Mamos in the group, visits the observatory at the University of London where he meets Richard Ellis, the Steele Professor of Astronomy Professor Richard Ellis Ellis is astounded by Shibulata's knowledge of both the Solar System and astronomical discoveries such as dark energy. After their return to Colombia with the gold thread, the Kogis conduct the demonstration. A group of leading modern scientists observe the results and find that the science of the Mamos may be at the 'cutting edge'
"They lay the gold thread from one river estuary in Colombia to another in order to show how the destruction of river estuaries feeds back upthe river in the end to destroy the source of the river. Showing the interconnectedness of everything on the earth and this was the key element in what they were doing. The theme of what they were doing was showing that the earth itself is a living body in which everything is interconnected and damage to some of it is damage to all of it."— Alan Ereira.
Originally the budget was set at £270,000. Alan Ereira got Bruce Parry interested in the project and Parry met with the Kogi, who agreed to the project. With Parry involved, the BBC offered £180,000 and Indus Films offered a further £20,000. However, when Bruce Parry became 'committed to another project', the offer of funding from the BBC was withdrawn. Therefore, Alan Ereira had to seek alternative funding. Some of this funding came from the British charity, The Onaway Trust, which also helped fund Ereira's book on the Kogis, The Heart of the World. The Kogis had their own indigenous film crew, making it possible for the film to include previously unrecorded holy sites and practices that other film crews had been prohibited from seeing. Throughout the collaboration the Kogis exercised their autonomy while the film's director, Alan Ereira, looked forward to see what the indigenous crew had recorded. The Mamas took charge of what was going to be filmed and consulted Aluna through divinations. The collaboration between the indigenous crew and the professional camera crews made it possible for Alan Ereira to bring a camera operator and a sound recordist to work with their indigenous counterparts in Colombia.
