Snake Oil Song
Director: Micah Van Hove
United States, 2025, 97 min
Shooting Format:RED
Festival Year:2026
Category:Narrative Feature
Genres:Adventure, Drama, Hybrid-Fiction
Cast:Guillermo Subauste, Nelson Gonzales Garcia, Freddy Becerra, Raymond Steers, Tatiana Karen Sanabria
Crew:Writers: Micah Van Hove, Jeffrey Reeser. Producers: Micah Van Hove, Estephania Bonnett, Juan Pablo Caballero, Brett Pedersen. Editors: Micah Van Hove, Jeffrey Reeser; Executive Producers: Lynda Weinman, Alex C. Rudolph, Jim Cummings, Benjamin Wiessner, Zack Parker
Email:umuima@gmail.com
Synopsis
Chino's life on the outskirts of the Amazon is consumed by one thing: hunting the anaconda that ate his dog. When an American journalist hires Chino to travel to a dangerous area, an encounter with illegal gold miners causes Chino's life on the river to unravel.
About the director
Micah Van Hove grew up on the crossroads of opulence and poverty in small town Southern California and has been exploring the possibilities in micro-budget cinema since 2009. A director, cinematographer, and a writer at nofilmschool.com, Micah is fascinated with the foibles of youth, alienation and expectation.
Filmmaker's note
In the spirit of adventurous filmmaking in the jungle, we built the film out of the stories from people that we met in the Amazon and folded their realities into the fabric of our narrative universe. Shot on location in Colombia with the use of natural actors, we aim to capture a poetic balance between realism and genre-driven fiction. The jungle becomes a system of images, a language to highlight the divide between natural and unnatural, moral and immoral. This project was born out of a short film made under the mentorship of Werner Herzog in Peru in 2018.