Top 100 Most Anticipated Foreign Films of 2018: #71. Ciro Guerra & Cristina Gallegos’ Birds of Passage

Birds of Passage

Columbian director Ciro Guerra unveiled one of 2015’s best titles with his third film Embrace of the Serpent (read review), an Amazonian, post-colonial odyssey which won top prize out of Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes and became the first Columbian film nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Needless to say, Guerra became an instant person of interest internationally, and will soon embark on his English language debut Waiting for the Barbarians set to star Robert Pattinson and Mark Rylance. But before that, Guerra has completed his most ambitious film to date, Birds of Passage, which has been described as a massive Latin American production which utilized hundreds of extras. Cited as a Columbian Western with the tone of a Greek tragedy, a family falls apart when the marijuana trade arrives in the 1970s, unfolding in the Guajira desert, where Guerra also filmed his 2009 title The Wind Journeys. Guerra’s producer and sometimes editor Cristina Gallego co-directed the film.

Release Date/Prediction: The first images of Birds of Passage were revealed at AFM this fall, and the film has been confirmed as ready to premiere for the second quarter of 2018, which means we can look forward to seeing Guerra and Gallego at Cannes. While The Wind Journeys and Embrace of the Serpent both premiered out of Directors’ Fortnight, we could expect to see Birds of Passage teeter into Un Certain Regard or perhaps the main competition (the 2016 program had a rather paltry Latin American offering).