Ciro Guerra is just as much an anthropologist, exploring his home country, as a film maker. His intertwining of the two disciplines in Birds of Passage is daring and poetic. Just as he did with his 2009’s The Wind Journeys and the 2015 Oscar nominated Embrace of the Serpent, Guerra in this new collaboration with debutant director Cristina Gallego again takes us voyeurs to explore an indigenous ethnography in Columbia.
Delicately, over a 20 year span, it re-enacts the true events of the rural Wayuu people, the expansion of the drug trade and all the inevitable violence that ensued. In this world, Guerra finds and extracts all the metaphors and cultural adornment that he can. To me it was as if he were adapting a photography exhibition into a movie. At times it is spell binding, certainly precocious and even entertaining.
The film is divided into 5 prophetic and poetically titled acts; Wild Grass, The Graves, Prosperity, The War and Limbo. Ursula plays the respected elder and mother of the beautiful and mysterious Zaida, who as daughter of the most revered matriarch of their people, comes at quite a high dowry. Rapayet, the film’s tragic hero, declares his devotion to Zaida early on and manages to obtain the dowry through selling marijuana to American tourists.
The most poignant scene for me was one that sets the stage for a metaphor that will come to serve as a powerful engine throughout the film. In this stunningly shot scene, Zaida anthropomorphises into a bird, spreads her rich red cloak out and begins a ritual dance with her suitor which may only be described as a sort of cat and mouse chase. Zaida’s devastating allure and overbearing red cloak that encroaches upon its fatale, could be paralleled with that of the money-making temptations of the outside world. Her first opponent falls victim, while Rapayet holds out. This is interesting, in terms of where it foreshadows his fate to be heading. Whether or not the viewer perceives this metaphor, the ritual undoubtedly is a spiritual moment between Zaida and Rapayet that will remain as one of the most memorable moments of the film.
The style is unique, mixing the thrill of epics like The Godfather and Scarface with the metaphor and spiritual realism of films like The Tree of Life, as well as a touch of ghostly surrealism akin to films such as Uncle Boonme Who Can Recall His Past Lives. The wind is a strong motif, always blowing in the background, like a sort of pathetic fallacy that is carrying the Wayuu rapidly into the new world. We are also caught between contrasting landscapes; the arid desert where Zaida and Ursula live and the lush luxurious forests and beaches where the marijuana is grown. Through Guerra’s enchanting cinematography, we are drawn to and torn by both worlds, just as Rapayet finds himself when his loyalties to two clashing sides get the better of him.
For those who find the dream sequences aggrandising, or the spiritual metaphor meandering, this could perhaps not feel like a naturalistic representation of the culture. However, I think Guerra’s gloriously magical style serves as the mere but fitting backdrop to a story told from the perspective of a participative observer. With all the umpteen dramas and documentaries about Columbia’s drug trade that disregard their international reputation, this film makes a more powerful statement and shows the unseen world of traditional Columbia and its encroachment by the drug trade. And to be able to capture these tensions between the old and new world, without glorifying or insulting either worlds is quite a feat; one for the ultimate objective storyteller.