• 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
  • Recommend