The doorway to death is the last great frontier in a human life. We know intellectually our time will end, and yet, in the Western world at least we often act as if death is a mirage, disappearing the closer we move towards it. Produced by Jo-Anne Wallace and directed by Lynette Walworth, this extraordinary documentary follows two doctors in Melbourne who have engaged psilocybin to help ease the anguish of patients at end of life, and the remarkable results they have seen. But this visioning tool, like other plant medicines, is not new, it comes from ancient traditions that are now being funnelled into Western medicine. It is possible the world’s oldest cultures have something important to teach us, not just about traditional medicines but about one of the most essential aspects of human life, its end?

The film starts in a Melbourne hospital room and ends deep in the Brazilian Amazon. The patients, Flavia and Ros, reveal the radically transformative effect of the ‘treatment’ which opens them up to an expanded sense of reality, but in doing so raises many questions. The psilocybin experience, the doctors find, cannot easily be corralled into a Western medical mindset. Knowing they have been working with medicines that indigenous cultures have long used, the Dr’s seek help elsewhere, which sets them on a path to connect with Indigenous knowledge holders such as Mayan Shaman Danil Pech Cetz and Yawanawa Shaman Muka Yawanawa to try and understand what may have been lost from our culture when we professionalised death and why that loss causes so many to die afraid, missing perhaps, an opportunity for revelation offered at the edge of human existence, its ending?