Cannes Film Review: ‘Birds of Passage’

These days, with “Narcos” on Netflix and “Loving Pablo” in theaters, South American drug stories are a dime a dozen — or, maybe, 10 bucks a bag — but you’ve never seen one like “Birds of Passage,” a visually stunning and often surprising true story that charts the rise of the Colombian drug business back before Escobar from its unexpected roots, among an indigenous clan in way over their heads.

Matching its artistic vision in anthropological value, this fresh take on a familiar genre — told from the point of view of the country’s Wayuu people — marks an ambitious follow up to the Oscar-nominated “Embrace of the Serpent” for helmer Ciro Guerra and his wife, producer Cristina Gallego.Over the course of four features together, Guerra and Gallego have gone a long way to represent native experiences otherwise undocumented on film, but “Birds of Passage” marks the first time they have shared

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