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…]