Birds of passage
(Pájaros de verano)

After The Wind Journeys (2009) and The Embrace of the Serpent (2015), Ciro Guerra and Cristina Gallego continue to revisit the history of their native Colombia. And, with each new furrow, they delve into the ethnological dimension of the previous from a different viewpoint. As in a fairy tale, mindful of ritual and language, Pájaros de Verano (the Spanish title) takes us into the Wayuu community. A young Indian, bedazzled by the beauty of a woman his own age, asks another clan for her hand. Revisiting a key moment in Colombia’s recent past, around the 1960s and 1970s, the story stages a confrontation between two trajectories travelling in opposite directions. On one side, the ancestral laws and mythologies perpetuated by the Wayuu people to safeguard their cohesion and, on the other side, the corruption of a world based on a narco-economy that spawned the drug cartels. The same detour appears in how he goes about it. In appearance, the fable remains as tense as a drawn bow so as to more effectively express the corrosion of indigenous customs and their dissolution in an endemic violence. As if one genre – the gangster film – had replaced another and also acculturated all other local signs, leaving them with nothing but a semblance of continuity. JB