Guerra’s second straight excellent film after 2015’s Embrace of the Serpent. It’s telling a traditional (this one even more traditional) from a different perspective. This is the rise of a crime family but from the Wayuu tribe in Columbia. Meditation on colonialism and civilization from the perspective of the indigenous people—it does it the gangster film tropes but it’s fascinating
Form- chapter breaks called “songs” and the entire story is framed as folklore from an old storyteller- oral history
Narrative is fantastic—City of God, A Prophet– saga
Like Serpent in the final third it dives further into surrealism
John Ford’s sense of community and ritual—it keeps the film and characters detailed and never broad or generic
Tremendously sad – earned
A complex matriarch character, understated protagonist
A great shot of a shooting of a mansion isolated in the desert, a storm coming in
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