{"id":93695,"date":"2018-09-19T10:00:06","date_gmt":"2018-09-19T17:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/?p=93695"},"modified":"2018-09-16T17:48:18","modified_gmt":"2018-09-17T00:48:18","slug":"tiff-2018-birds-of-passage-movie-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/tiff-2018-birds-of-passage-movie-review\/","title":{"rendered":"TIFF Journal: Birds of Passage"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Christina Gallego and Ciro Guerra&#8217;s <em>Birds of Passage<\/em> is a film of great beauty and great brutality. It crafts a deeply moving tale of one family&#8217;s rise and fall as a crime empire in the desert-like sands of Colombia.<br \/>\n<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Told in episodic chapters dubbed &#8220;cantos&#8221; (or &#8220;songs&#8221;), the film feels near mythic, despite being based on real events from the 1960s and &#8217;70s. The story is told with ethnographic precision, detailing the various customs and social strata surrounding a Wayuu family as they emerge from their insular ways to deal in vast quantities of marijuana for an insatiable American market.<\/p>\n<p>The film begins with the emergence of a young girl who has been isolated for most of her life. In celebration of her inclusion in the community as a woman, she performs a dance where she flares her dress. A young boy (her brother) tries to keep up while marching backwards and responding to her cues. When he falls, another takes his place, a man from an outside group who has ideas of his own, anxious not only to win her affections but to become part of this powerful trading family.<\/p>\n<p>With such small beginnings launches a <em>Scarface<\/em>-like rise where betrayal, murder and hubris are the inevitable result of the quest for power within the drug trade. Yet Gallego and Guerra&#8217;s gift lies not in genre thrills, but in their exquisite capacity for precision and specificity. The textures and shifting allegiances of the community are detailed in astonishing ways. This documentary-like quality, mixed with the added dash of crime saga swagger, makes <em>Birds of Passage<\/em> a highly effective and unique film. <\/p>\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on the_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Christina Gallego and Ciro Guerra&#8217;s Birds of Passage is a film of great beauty and great brutality. It crafts a deeply moving tale of one family&#8217;s rise and fall as a crime empire in the desert-like sands of Colombia.<\/p>\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on the_excerpt -->","protected":false},"author":298,"featured_media":93696,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4508],"tags":[10337,1234,1303,1233],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93695"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/298"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93695"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93695\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":93700,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93695\/revisions\/93700"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/93696"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}