Jio MAMI 20th Mumbai Film Festival Day 7 highlights: Colombian film Birds of Passage, Steve McQueen's Widows

The Colombian drug trade is known to be a classic fodder for high drama and just when you thought this canon of storytelling has been stretched to its last potential, here comes a film to prove us wrong.

Birds of Passage (Pajaros de verano) is a Columbian film directed by Christina Gallego and Ciro Guerra, that goes back to the time between the 60s and the 80s, which subsequently set the stage for the Pablo Escobars of the world to flourish. It tells the story of the Wayyus, a Native American ethnic group that inhabited the Guajira Peninsula in the northern most tip of Columbia. It’s The Godfather, Marquez and Greek tragedy all rolled into one, where we see the rise and fall of the Pushaina family as they lose sight of their ancestral traditions of simple living, thanks to the smell of weed and the endless stream of cash it leads them to. [caption id=“attachment_5493851” align=“alignnone” width=“825”]  The poster of Birds of Passage. Image from Facebook.[/caption] While the trajectory of the plot is typical, it’s the treatment that makes this a treat. The story unfolds in the desert land of Guajira where drugs enter the family as dowry. A smitten Raphayet is given the task of amassing an unrealistic dowry comprising goats and mules and necklaces, by the mother of the girl he wants to marry. Zaida is the daughter of the local matriarch, the ruthless Ursula Pushaina, who, in her own words will do anything to save her clan. That’s not an empty threat, as we eventually learn. A small-time coffee hustler, Raphayet strikes a deal to supply marijuana to a group of American Peace Corps workers, a bunch of hippies looking to score when they are not distributing anti-Communism pamphlets to the locals. What starts as naïveté in the quest of romance soon transitions into a well-oiled machinery of weed supply. Raphayet and the Pushaina family become a formidable force of drug runners. But, his partnership with his best friend Moises, a non-Wayyu referred to as “alijunas”, or outsider, costs him dearly when his trigger-happy, loose-cannon friend indulges in bloodshed, something that the Wayyu tradition takes great offense to. That’s where starts a saga of an endless stream of scores being settled, initially with goats and mules and eventually with guns and human lives. Cloaked in the Latin American brand of magic realism, Birds of Passage never overdoes it. The film has a lilting rhythm, told through five songs or chapters: Wild Grass, The Graves, Prosperity, The War and Limbo. This is a world where between gunfights and drug deals, there are also spirits walking and dreams telling you what’s coming next. It’s surreal that an entire culture of drug trade has its source in superstitions and tribal traditions, where ruthless drug lords are in the end guided by ancestral beliefs. Birds are a leitmotif in the film, almost seen as magical creatures with powers of clairvoyance. Another powerful symbolism in the film, I thought, is the desert that acts as the stage for this dynastic degeneration, so as to show that greed can only lead to a barren conclusion. Jose Acosta’s Raphayet reminds you of Michael Corleone but the actor lends a certain innocence to his character, unlike Al Pacino’s surefooted and unforgiving Michael. Raphayet remains someone who is trying to wrap his head around the inescapable violence of his world, even though he is no passive player in it. Acosta plays this conflict with perfection. Carmina Martinez brings about a nonchalant brutality to her Ursula that makes you shudder. What’s refreshing about the film is how a story of violence is told without gore; the brutality is never glamourised and is therefore more impactful. Also, it doesn’t meander into the technicalities of the early days of drug trade. Instead, it mirrors the impact that the cannabis boom has on a simple community of hardworking people. The tribal percussions of Leonardo Heiblum’s background score makes this a haunting folkloresque experience, while David Gallego’s cinematography celebrates colours and textures of the landscape but not from an exotic lens. Birds of Passage was the screened at the Director’s Fortnight in Cannes this year and was among the most talked about films at the 20th Jio MAMI Film Festival. I got a chance to watch it only on the very last day and even then it ran to a packed house. The corridors on closing day was picture of frenzy as usual with people grabbing the last chance to queue up for their wish-list films, especially the closing film Widows starring Viola Davis. The last day of MAMI is always a time of a heightened exchanging of notes on what was seen and what was missed. MAMI conversations have a strange character where people, mostly while standing in queues, discuss and dissect films with total strangers and only rarely introductions are exchanged. It’s like no specifics beyond films even matter. You are just a person who saw Roma and walked out of Climax. And after a week of minimum sleep, battling traffic, standing in queues, and eating popcorn and samosa that cost more than your MAMI ticket, in the end, you agree on one thing: it was all worth it.