Synopsis
Birds of Passage (Pájaros de verano, 2018) — watch online on iFILM this Colombian crime drama from directors Ciro Guerra and Cristina Gallego. Set across two decades in Colombia's remote Guajira desert, the film follows Rapayet, a Wayuu indigenous trader who stumbles into the marijuana boom of the 1960s-80s and drags his clan in with him.
What starts as a bride price deal with American students slowly metastasizes into cartel territory. Each generation of the family grows richer, more brutal, and less Wayuu — the ancestral codes, rituals and language crumbling under the weight of drug money. The film traces this collapse through five chapters titled like myths, which is precisely the point: Guerra and Gallego frame narco origin as a Greek tragedy wearing indigenous dress.
The film picked up the FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes 2018 and was Colombia's Oscar submission that year. If you know Guerra's Embrace of the Serpent, the visual ambition here is familiar — but the pacing is sharper and the violence far less oblique. Stream Birds of Passage (2018) online on iFILM.
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