“Birds of Passage” is a gangster epic with more than a dozen symbolic and entwined characters over three generations, yet its most striking visual might be a house. The new film from Ciro Guerra and Cristina Gallego almost aims to startle the viewer with the crime family’s modernist compound, revealing it just after one of the film’s folklore-inspired act breaks. We jump through time, and there it is—part art installation, part military fort sitting lonesome on the barren edge of a northern Colombia desert.
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The house is an eerie trapping of a burgeoning 1970s drug trade and signals as profoundly as any murder or betrayal that contemporary capitalism is an invasive species. Here, the natives are the indigenous Wayuu people, who’ve called remote nature their home since time began.
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The follow-up to Guerra’s 2015 breakout “Embrace of the Serpent,” “Birds of Passage” bears the familiar cinematic shape of myriad other crime epics yet seeks to ask deeper, too often uninterrogated questions about what it looks like when greed takes its first root, especially in communities largely ignored by the outside world. In that sense, “Birds of Passage” picks up where “Embrace of the Serpent” left off in many ways, reaching back through native histories and myths for new cinematic vantage points.
I spoke to Gallego last week about the division of labor between her and Guerra on their first film as co-directors, the sometimes strange ways the Wayuu remember this corrupting time in their history and why she keeps making movies about cultural erasure. Listen to the interview in our podcast chat below.
“Birds Of Passage” opens in limited release in New York on February 13, and Los Angeles on February 15, via The Orchard.