Film
Birds of Passage
- Director
- Ciro Guerra, Cristina Gallego
- Certificate
- 15
- Running Time
- 126 mins
Colombia’s official submission to the Oscars is a sumptuous mob epic with a tribal twist from Ciro Guera, director of the sublime Embrace of the Serpent. The focus here is on the isolated indigenous Wayúu people of north Colombia, specifically a young man named Rapayet (José Acosta), who starts off by selling weed to some American hippies in the 1960s. Before long, he’s sucked into the drug trafficking trade, as all those familiar gangster flick tropes pile up (corruption, greed, betrayal, whackings, etc) with dramatic implications for his family and culture.
Based on real events and unfolding in five chapters (Wild Grass, The Graves, Prosperity, The War and Limbo), Birds Of Passage succeeds in finding something genuinely new to say in a cliché ridden genre. As Screen International noted: “Notwithstanding the bleak trajectory down which any film about blood feuds must spiral, this is an engrossing narco-thriller which deftly balances the storytelling tradition of the Wayuu with the genre conventions of the crime movie and the western.”
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