Two men meet in downtown Bogotá; one is missing a leg, the other is a "silletero," a man who carries people around for money. Each character bears the burden of a bitter past life. This is the film chosen by Colombia to represent the country at the 2006 Academy Awards.

After his wife's death, a vallenato singer from Majagual, Sucre, decides to quit music and return his allegedly cursed accordion to his master. He is joined by Fermín Morales, a teenage boy who admires him and wishes to follow his footsteps. Together, they start a journey throughout several towns in Northern Colombia to Taroa, in La Guajira desert, where the singer's master supposedly lives.

The epic story of the first contact, encounter, approach, betrayal and, eventually, life-transcending friendship, between Karamakate, an Amazonian shaman, last survivor of his people, and two scientists that, over the course of 40 years, travel through the Amazon in search of a sacred plant that can heal them. Inspired by the journals of the first explorers of the Colombian Amazon, Theodor Koch-Grunberg and Richard Evans Schultes.