BIRDS OF PASSAGE

Cirro Guerra’s film Embrace of the Serpent from 2015 was an audacious journey into Colombia’s dark interior. He’s now collaborated with his long-term producer, Cristina Gallego, to create this startling and intriguing movie, brimming with images and ideas, which grafts a quasi-ethnographical docu-drama about the indigenous Wayuu tribe in the northern state of La Guajira onto a poetic reimagining of the rise of Colombia’s marijuana trade over a period of 20 years. The film mixes professional and non-professional actors in a drama of capital and empire involving a people whose culture has already been affected by the Spanish and is now about to be corrupted by the English-speakers of the north.