The Lost City of Z found its way to the New York Film Festival on Saturday, filling the fest’s closing night slot. James Gray’s film, which stars Charlie Hunnam as British explorer Percy Fawcett, is an ambitious, solidly acted, and beautifully lensed work that takes viewers on an adventure down the Amazon in search of the fabled “City of Gold”. Set in the early 20th century at the time of the Amazon rubber boom, the film has the air of a good old-fashioned Hollywood epic, complete with its white gaze. While watching, we couldn’t help but think of Ciro Guerra’s Academy Award-nominated Embrace of the Serpent, which was in theaters earlier this year (see trailer below). The films make for interesting companion pieces, so we’ve decided to look at them side-by-side.

Gray and Guerra’s productions have quite a few things in common. Both stories are set in the early 20th Century toward the end of the European colonial period, are based on real-life accounts, and find white men on expeditions in the Amazon. Gray’s protagonist becomes obsessed with an ancient city, while in Guerra’s film, the explorers are searching for the sacred and difficult-to-find psychedelic Yakruna plant.

From a technical standpoint, the filmmakers also had similar challenges. Both selected to shoot on film (Gray: 35mm, Guerra: S35mm, black & white), and had hellish experiences being on location in the Colombian jungle. During the The Lost City of Z press conference on Saturday at the New York Film Festival, Gray and the cast, which in addition to Hunnam includes Robert Pattinson, Sienna Miller, Tom Holland and Angus MacFadyen, talked about the extreme humidity, floods, and black caiman-infested waters. During Guerra’s production, he enlisted a shaman who would perform ceremonies asking the jungle to keep them safe from disease, animals, and bad weather.

Now, where the projects differ is in their take on the subject matter. Gray’s odyssey is much more of typical adventure film, where the viewer is rooting for Fawcett as he leaves his family behind to embark on three different missions to the Amazon. During his first journey, Fawcett is given an Indian slave to help guide him down the river. Colonialism is hinted at, but mostly glossed over.

As for Guerra, he flips the script and tells a story that centers around an Amazonian shaman named Karamakate who, due to colonization, is the last survivor of his people. The Shaman is approached by two different white scientists (30 years apart) to help them find the Yakruna plant. Guerra’s film is poetic and tackles the subject of colonization head on.

There is certainly nothing wrong with a film about a heroic explorer, and Gray’s screen adaptation of David Grann’s book is stunning and grand. However, upon reflection, our thoughts keep straying back to Guerra’s revelatory feature, and how it illustrates the other side of the coin. The two films almost act like the him and her versions of The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby. If you haven’t seen Embrace of the Serpent, we recommend viewing the two films as a double bill when Gray’s film opens in theaters in April 2017.