Nation hails its first Oscar nomination

Colombia hailed on Thursday the 2016 Oscar Award nomination for the movie Embrace of the Serpent as Best Foreign Language Film, the country's first movie to be nominated for the award.

"It is a big surprise for us to be nominated. I am really stunned by the news," director Ciro Guerra said in a news conference shortly after the nominations were announced, saying that it is an honor "to be the first (nomination of a Colombian movie) and be the representative of Latin America".

The movie, produced in 2015, tells two stories taking place simultaneously in 1909 and 1940, in which an Amazonian shaman Karamakate travels with two scientists German Theodor Koch-Grunberg and US citizen Richard Evans Schultes in search of a rare sacred plant named "yakruna" that helps cure many diseases.