Weed thriller

You don’t come across too many films from Colombia, but every few years one wriggles its way through the festival circuit and on to an arthouse screen, fingers crossed near you. Any film that survives that Darwinian journey will be robustly fit for purpose. Such is Birds of Passage (original title: Pajaros de verano), which with startling freshness tells a tale of gruelling familiarity.

There tend to be two Colombian subjects that work for distributors: the international drugs trade or, for more rarefied tastes, indigenous tribes. What are the chances of encountering a film that fuses both? Slim, you’d suppose. And yet this narco-ethnographic thriller is inspired, we are advised, by events that took place between 1960 and 1980 in the Guajira region of northern Colombia.

The setting is a sandy wilderness of wind-lashed scrub on the Caribbean coast. A family in the Wayuu tribe takes offers from neighbouring families for an eligible daughter Zaida (Natalia Reyes), who has spent a preparatory year in confinement. In a circular courtship dance she throws her robed arms wide like an avian predator and stalks her retreating suitor. Rapayet (Jose Acosta), a quiet handsome type whose shades and a straw hat hint at contact with the ways of the outside world, wins her only when he adheres to Wayuu custom and meets the family’s demand for cattle, goats and ‘two decorative mules’.

The opening section could be a sober anthropological study of a native culture: it’s got the huts fashioned from sticks, the buttock-baring male pouches and a wailing narrator. Then Rapayet walks into a bar and meets some Peace Corps hippies looking to score some marijuana to smoke. He enlists his smiling black friend Moises (Jhon Narvaez) to help him buy a shipment from Anibal (Juan Bautista Martinez), the head of another Wayuu family who lives deep in the bush and delivers the merch on a caravan of donkeys.