In 2015, Colombian filmmaker Ciro Guerra won the world’s attention with his Oscar-nominated Embrace The Serpent, a bold black-and-white drama that followed an Amazonian tribesman as he leads white scientists into the wild in search of a curative plant. Culture clash also plays at the heart of his much-anticipated follow-up, Birds of Passage (A.K.A. Pájaros de verano), which was Columbia’s submission for the Best Foreign-Language Academy Award this year. In the 1970s, the Wayúu community of northern Colombia’s Guajira Desert was dedicated to its traditions, observant of omens, and suspicious of outsiders. But as an emerging drug trade gave them access to wealth and power, their community became less isolated and less united. [Read more…]
Birds Of Passage
In modern movie terminology, “epic” usually just means long, crowded and grandiose. Birds of Passage (2019), Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra’s follow-up to their astonishing, hallucinatory, Oscar-nominated Embrace of the Serpent, earns the label in a more honest and rigorous manner. Parts of the story are narrated by a blind singer — a literally Homeric figure — and the story itself upholds Ezra Pound’s definition of the epic as “a poem containing history.” It’s about how the world changes, about how individual actions and the forces of fate work in concert to bring glory and ruin to a hero and his family. [Read more…]
Embrace of the Serpent
“The horror! The horror!” The terminal valediction of Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is deconstructed with a raging eloquence in the Colombian director Ciro Guerra’s majestic, spellbinding film, Embrace of the Serpent (2105). Is the unspeakable savagery evoked by his dying words really beyond the reach of the civilized imagination? I doubt it. [Read more…]