There is a tinge of irony that a large portion of SBIFF’s bounty of foreign films — the “international” piece of the festival’s puzzle — are screened in the multiplexes of the Metro and the Fiesta 5, although many of the more memorable movies seen in those non-arthouses give an impression of “we’re not in the American multiplex anymore.” Sometimes where a film is screened is no matter, as with the clever, history and hypnosis-based “who made whodunnit” Murderous Trance aka The Guardian Angel, and the Danish In Love and War, which are strong, polished numbers with a mainstream cinema appeal. But there are also unorthodox films arriving with an offbeat “festival” patina, probably destined to never lighten a multiplex screen in festival off-season. Take, for example, two of yesterday’s prize screenings, the Colombian Birds of Passage and the Lativan Van Goghs (no, it’s not yet another Vincent biopic).
Birds of Passage is an especially fascinating example of genre mixing, which co-director Ciro Guerra, in a Q&A after the first screening, reportedly described as “anti-genre.” The truth-based story concerns the fragile and fatal intersection of the indigenous Wayuu tribe of northern Colombia and growing drug trade’s seductions and ultimately destructive force. We are instantly sucked into the Colombian gangster elements, having been duly briefed on the subject with the television series Narcos. But the more compelling aspect of the film traces its story from the Wayuu perspective from the 1960s through the ’80s. While marijuana trafficking brought newfound prosperity, it eventually ripped apart the social and family fabric of Wayuu life, another victim of imperialist uprooting and modernity.
Guerra (who directed the film with Cristina Gallego) is making a triumphant return to SBIFF with the film, following his 2015 appearance with the stunning Embrace of the Serpent, one of that year’s highlights. Whereas Embrace dealt historically and mystically with the legacy of indigenous, pre-Spanish life in Colombia, Birds of Passage takes artful aim at the roots-obliterating effects of modernity on indigenous antiquity in Colombia. At film’s end, a sage sings/narrates a song about the demise, in which “wild grass turned into locusts.”