Accompanying the book of the same name, Iain Sinclair extends his psychogeographic franchise out to the New World in this lightly dramatised documentary, which traces the 1891 trek of his great-grandfather Arthur Sinclair into the Amazon jungle to set up a coffee plantation for the Peruvian Corporation of London. Kicking off with testimony from the Asháninka people whose land was hijacked, his stated aim is a Conradian voyage upriver – only reversing the “romance” surrounding the colonial plunder of the time and still stinking out certain culture-war circles today.
Sinclair actually made this journey for his book, with his daughter Farne. But in writing the narration for the film version, he opts for an odd distancing affectation: it is in the mordant voice of his longtime nomen à clef Andrew Norton, a “recovering writer” prowling his apartment (played here by Michael Byrne) in St Leonards’ Marine Court. Here, he receives the footage of his daughter’s Andean crossing from Peru, as well as pondering the legacy of empire with various academics over Zoom.
