Birds of Passage (Pájaros de verano)

Ciro Guerra on the set with Cristina Gallego

Cristina Gallego

BIRDS OF PASSAGE (Pájaros de verano)               B-                   

Colombia  Mexico  Denmark  (125 mi)  2018 ‘Scope   d:  Ciro Guerra and Cristina Gallego

Returning to the same territory where he filmed THE WIND JOURNEYS (2009), this is a film that attempts to straddle two worlds, struggling to remain faithful to the Wayúu Nation, an indigenous Indian tribe living autonomously in the northern desert province of Guajira, Columbia, using an oral history along with a tradition of recognizing the significance of signs and symbols from dreams as being sacred and truthful, able to decipher omens and superstitions, yet it also adheres to conventional Western traditions when it comes to storytelling, creating an endlessly gloomy succession of acts of revenge, becoming idiotic and monotonous after a while, as the reprehensible acts giving rise to these events border on sheer stupidity.  That makes it difficult to understand all the praise heaped upon this film, made by the same director who created the enticingly original black and white film, 2015 Top Ten List #8 Embrace of the Serpent (El abrazo de la serpiente), yet this film lacks the unique vision and power of his earlier work.  Borrowing from Western models of bloody gangland retribution undermines what could otherwise be a markedly poetic attempt to express an indigenous culture strictly in their own terms.  By introducing the Narco drug trade into their remote and isolated communities, the film recreates metaphorically what actually happened from the 1960’s to the 80’s in rural farmlands across Colombia, as families turned against families due to the influx of huge sums of cash, creating a distorted imbalance to their natural world, with the film suggesting the drug trade literally destroyed indigenous communities that had survived for centuries, fending off Spanish Conquistadors, the British Navy, waves of pirates, and various Colombian governments trying to control them.  Yet in a few short decades they were wiped off the map, gone, but not forgotten, as the filmmakers attempt to pay tribute to their lives.  In revisiting the ghosts of the past, this allegorical film resembles the African filmmaking of Sembène’s CEDDO (1977), Cissé’s YELEEN (1987), or Sissako’s Timbuktu (2014), especially the tribes living in the vast emptiness of the desert, dressed in colorful flowing robes, where the attainment of goats and cows provides family status and wealth, with a tradition of “word messengers” acting as good will ambassadors between tribes, men and women who come and go in peace, resembling the African tradition of griots, oral storytellers who recount the rich history of each tribe, passing on knowledge to each new generation.           

Shot in bright, saturated colors by David Gallego in 35mm, mostly in natural light, the film starts innocently enough with a vividly ritualistic dance ceremony, featuring Natalia Reyes as Zaida in a blazing red dress with extended sleeves, announcing her entry into womanhood, daughter of the tribe’s powerful matriarch Úrsula Pushaima (Carmiña Martínez), where she is viewed as a coveted prize.  Rapayet (José Acosta), from a neighboring tribe, takes notice, but to win her hand Úrsula demands a king’s ransom to pay her dowry, 30 goats and 20 cows, far more than any young person could afford, including the impoverished Rapayet, a coffee producer raised by his uncle Peregrino (José Vicente Cote), who is a skilled word messenger with a sacred duty.  Undeterred, Rapayet is enterprising, venturing into a business proposition with the help of a friend, Moisés (Jhon Narváez), who is something of a loose cannon, yet they run into a group of Americans who have made their presence felt in the region working with the Peace Corps, spewing anti-communist rhetoric while in search of local marijuana (which the film substitutes for cocaine trafficking, leaving out the leftist guerilla groups and right wing paramilitaries).  With the help from his uncle Aníbal (Juan Bautista Martínez) and his mountaintop farm, a profitable business relationship is established that will not only pay Zaida’s dowry, but make him the most powerful drug lord in the region.  While Úrsula views him with suspicion, especially his willingness to deal with alijunas (outsiders), nonetheless she agrees to the marriage.  But the stain of Western capitalism has been introduced, quickly infiltrating through the ranks, where the necessity of protective lethal weapons becomes commonplace, with a cadre of soldiers guarding both Rapayet and Aníbal wherever they go, while Úrsula builds a gargantuan white palace in the barren emptiness of the desert landscape, an almost obscene sight, like a fortified bank appearing out of nowhere, showing signs of corrosion to the family traditions.  When Moisés disrupts a deal gone bad, shooting a couple of Americans, a shockwave of blatant dishonor must be answered for, yet a corrupting influence is released instead.  Perhaps even more inexplicably, Úrsula’s reprehensible younger son Leonidas (Gredier Meza) turns out to be a sociopathic menace (as if Scorsese’s Joe Pesci has somehow been transported from the streets of Brooklyn to the plains of the Wayúu tribe), utterly spoiled, completely out of control, a drunken misfit used to getting his way who violates all known moral boundaries.  His toxic influence sends both families into a perpetual gang war from which they never recover.

While the Wayúu tribe held onto their traditions living in close-knit tribes, protecting themselves against the encroaching influences of the outside world, the film offers some insight into the way they collectively make group decisions, allowing dreams and superstitions to influence their behavior, believing in ghosts and a communion with the dead, incorporating many of the aesthetic and ritualistic aspects of their culture, where dreams seamlessly flow into their existing reality, with the director allowing bits and pieces of magical realism to creep into the scenes.  Significantly, the great grandmother of famed Colombian author and Nobel prize-winner Gabriel García Márquez was a member of the Wayúu tribe, where his brilliant and wildly imaginative novel 100 Years of Solitude exposed the world to this exact same kind of hallucinogenic viewpoint (with the matriarch of the Buendía family also named Úrsula), where in the blink of an eye another close-knit family vanishes from the face of the earth.  The co-directors Guerra and Gallego, a married couple who divorced during the production of the film, are themselves outsiders to this indigenous community, who in fact lead nomadic lives of extreme economic deprivation, forced to parched desert lands and inhospitable conditions so precarious that the geographic region is associated with dire poverty, with thousands of children dying from malnutrition, circumstances this film completely ignores, instead creating a mythical universe that’s more acceptable to western audiences.  Despite the best intentions, the film still exploits a culture that has been utterly marginalized and ignored, where the depiction onscreen is nothing at all like what they’re used to.  Nonetheless, the film uses a healthy dose of non-professionals in the cast (with 30% of the crew drawn from the Wayúu tribe), with no single character ever identifiable as the lead, moving back and forth from one to the other, instead viewed collectively, much like tribal culture, so outside of the matriarchal power of Carmiña Martínez as Úrsula (with 30 years of experience in the theater), none of the other characters have the ability to hold the screen, which contributes to a certain trance-like flatnesss in the performances that ends up distancing viewers from the reality of the depicted world.  Told in 5 acts, each identified through a folklore style song structure, the title curiously comes about fifteen minutes into the film, introducing the characters in their tribal element ahead of time.  With the introduction of tank-sized trucks armed with machine guns speeding through the desert in a cloud of dust, the film becomes increasingly violent, growing more and more pessimistic, with some resembling the walking dead before it’s all over, yet it’s hard not to be mystified by a grotesque outlandishness in the extreme levels of outrageous behavior, where despite all initial pledges to honor the family, those promises are quickly broken in the pursuit of a corrupting power hell-bent on exacting revenge, even if that means destroying themselves in the process.  It’s an unsettling experience, a cautionary tale that feels more like a Greek tragedy that’s been filtered through a western genre stylization, a kind of indigenous spaghetti western that goes spectacularly haywire.     

2015 Top Ten List #8 Embrace of the Serpent (El abrazo de la serpiente)

EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT (El abrazo de la serpiente)            A-                 
Colombia  Venezuela  Argentina  (125 mi)  2015  ‘Scope  d:  Crio Guerra    Official site    

Winner of the CICAE award at Cannes, which promotes art cinema, this surprisingly haunting period film, shot in black and white, with a brief expanse into color near the end, is not nearly as inventive or fantastical as Miguel Gomes’s 2013 Top Ten List #4 Tabu (2012), though it exists in an entirely different universe, offering a unique vantage point of those historically connected to Amazon rain forests and the indigenous population residing there.  The film is a road map for a journey into the past, exposing the brutal effects of colonialism imposed upon an indigenous population in Colombia, including the aftereffects of centuries of barbaric atrocities, slave labor, forced religious conversions, an elimination of their native languages, all highlighting the mammoth differences in cultural perspective between whites and local natives, as whites have plundered the rain forests in search of rubber and annihilated all but the last traces of an indigenous population, where the surviving native tribes no longer trust white people, having learned from personal experience that scheming whites are the lowest scourge of the earth.  The idea of profiting off the natural treasures found growing in the rain forest seems preposterous to the native people, who have for centuries developed a reverence for the sacred and curative powers of natural plants, such as the prized yakruna flower with alleged healing powers that whites wish to harvest in order to extract the purest rubber, where all whites see in the flower are dollar signs.  Even as these explorers hide their real intentions of what they plan to do with this plant if they find it, their writings about their expeditions provide the only window into this lost world.  What distinguishes this film is its ability to frame so much of the narrative around a non-white cultural perspective, holding a mirror up to Western civilization’s pattern of abuses in the region, offering a scintillatingly refreshing viewpoint that artistically evokes a curative solution for the hubris and arrogance that has perpetually guided outsiders into the region. 

Blending fact and fiction, the interconnected narrative follows a dual track thirty years apart, based upon the diaries of German ethnologist and explorer Theodor Koch-Grunberg in 1909, played by Jan Bijvoet from Borgman (2013), and another expedition that followed in his footsteps by American biologist and plant enthusiast Richard Evans Schultes in the 1940’s, played by Brionne Davis from AVENGED (2013), who had read Theo’s book, where each journey into the Amazon rain forest was in search of an elusive flower with amazing medicinal properties, where both men come in contact with the same medicine man or shaman, Karamakate, Niblio Torres in his youth and Antonio Bolivar as the older man, the last surviving member of his tribe in a region overrun by colonialists.  The blending of time adds a surreal quality to the film, where the slower pace of life along the river traversing by canoe through spectacular jungle foliage is already depicted in a lush, dreamlike atmosphere, beautifully shot by David Gallego, with an extraordinary sound design by Carlos García, enriched by the vivid sounds and sights of the flora and fauna, where as many as nine different languages are spoken along with native songs and ceremonial chants.  Wasting little time, the film gets right into the heart of the story, where a young Karamakate waits on a riverbank with a painted face in ceremonial attire, spear in hand, wearing only a loin cloth as a canoe approaches carrying a deathly-ill German scientist and a native companion Maduca (Yauenkü Migue) dressed in clothing worn by whites.  Asking if he would save his friend’s life, the shaman refuses, claiming it was the white man that destroyed his village and wiped out his entire tribe, where he’s all that’s left, showing an equal amount of contempt for both of them, telling them to go look elsewhere.  When Theo suggests there are survivors from his tribe and he knows where to find them, the irritated Karamakate reluctantly agrees to help, so long as they disturb nothing, while refusing to eat meat or fish and leaving the jungle intact.  Blowing a substance (likely a mixture of coca leaves) directly into his nose, Theo soon recovers, readily abiding by a new set of guidelines established by Karamakate, who must continually inject him with this curative medicine to avoid a relapse, as only the yakruna flower can provide a permanent cure. 

As they begin their Odysseus-like journey, the film possesses a near mythical quality as they encounter a series of unfortunate circumstances, deliberately entering Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, where the making of the film itself recalls the impossible encounters of Herzog’s FITZCARRALDO (1982), or the madness of AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD (1972), continually mixing the future with the past, where the filmmaker literally alters any concept of time, as it’s all part of the same “experience,” where Karamakate informs them “Listen to what the river can tell you.  Every tree, every flower brings wisdom.”  For the shaman, this is also a journey of rediscovery, as his powers have grown rusty from disuse, identifying as a chullachaqui (an empty shell of a human being), allowing himself to be a part of the world again where he once again lives in harmony with all things.  He ridicules the useless pile of suitcases that Theo lugs along at every step, suggesting “they’re just things” weighing them down, throwing them overboard at one point, while Theo claims he is a man of science, where he has to provide evidence of where he’s been or no one back in Germany would believe him, showing him notebooks of drawings he has made, or specimens he has collected along the way, which includes taking Karamakate’s photograph standing proudly as the master of his domain.  This same photograph is used to guide Richard back into the same region decades later, as they retrace the same steps traveled on the earlier journey still in search of the elusive plant.  In a way, the narrative structure resembles Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995), where an Indian leads a white man on a protracted journey of awakening just before the hour of his death, retracing their steps as they cross between several spiritual realms leading up to the “final crossing.”  As we see Theo socializing with a group of natives in their own language, where there is plenty of singing and dancing, he demonstrates the advanced power of a compass, which one of the natives takes to immediately, offering a handmade craft for its possession, which angers Theo, as it’s one of his most prized navigational tools, suggesting technology will alter their natural evolution, but Karamakate reminds him that blind ignorance is not some pure romanticized notion, “You cannot forbid them to learn. Knowledge belongs to all men.”

While there are many horrors seen along the way, perhaps the worst are the crimes perpetrated by the rubber industry, as they come across a grove of bleeding rubber trees, a reflection of the white presence in the Amazon, where Maduca angrily spills all the cups collecting the white sticky liquid released from gashes in the trunks of the trees, fuming over the Effects on indigenous population where the rubber barons viciously rounded up the local Indians by force, placed them in chains, killed them on the spot or cut off the arms of those that disobeyed, while ordering them to tap rubber out of the trees, where on one plantation alone that began with 50,000 Indians, only 8,000 remained after the harvest.  In some areas 90% of the Indian population was wiped out.  A distraught one-armed man they encounter is beside himself in grief at what they’ve done, knowing he will be held responsible, asking them to kill him right there on the spot, as he will surely not live to see another day.  Further down river they run into a deranged Spanish priest running a Catholic mission filled with orphaned native children who lost their parents to the rubber plantations, all dressed in white robes, where they are forbidden to speak in their native, or “pagan” language, including ancestral fables and stories, as any cultural reminders of where they came from is subject to brutal punishment, where the absurdity of the situation is so dire that the priest prefers to inflict the wrath of a public whipping even as the Colombian army approaches on a rampage through the countryside where in all likelihood they will eventually be slaughtered.  Besides a need to unburden themselves of material possessions, to explore the mystery of existence through consciousness alone, Karamakate reminds both scientists that they carry psychological baggage and cannot be cured of their illness because the white man has forgotten how to dream.  In spite of the sinister undercurrent, there’s a meditative quality to Guerra’s direction that culminates in a transformative final scene that transcends into a near-religious mystical experience, where the only way to heal is by learning how to dream, all emerging from their journeys as different men, as they are finally allowed to “experience” what they came in search of, literally exploding out of the subconscious like the final scenes of Tarkovsky’s ANDREI RUBLEV (1966), becoming a montage of brilliant, swirling colors, a hallucinogenic, dream-like vision revealing the magnificence of the cosmos, complete with animal gods and heavenly constellations, where the universe exists in all its abstract manifestations, pushing the boundaries of what is real and imagined, offering a poignant closing dedication to those “peoples whose song we will never know.”