Ciro Guerra

In Embrace of the Serpent (2015) the camera sits in the canoe with the shaman, not the scientist. That is Guerra's method in one shot. The white man going upriver is the oldest story the jungle film has, and Guerra hands it to the man doing the paddling, twice: Nilbio Torres as the young Karamakate guiding a dying German ethnographer, Antonio Bolívar as the old one guiding an American botanist who has read the German's diary. David Gallego shoots it in a black and white the colour of pewter, so that water, skin and leaf sit on the same grey scale. We came out quieter than we went in, and it was the grey that did it: the river and the two Karamakates, decades apart, looking like photographs somebody had found in a drawer.

He started young. Wandering Shadows (2004) was made at 23, and The Wind Journeys (2009) followed, a film about Colombia's regions and their music. Embrace made his name abroad. Then Birds of Passage (2018), co-directed with Cristina Gallego, who has produced him across four films, swapped the grey for the colours of the Wayuu and told the beginnings of the Colombian drug trade as a family tragedy wearing a western's clothes. We have not reviewed it, so we will say only that the ambition is plain. After that came episodes of the television series Green Frontier (2019) and Waiting for the Barbarians (2020), from the Coetzee novel, in English and on a larger scale than anything he had made before.

What works is the patience. Guerra films a culture the way an ethnographer would, close and unhurried, and he lets a story wander the way a story told aloud does, episode by episode, myth beside fact. He borrows genre, the western, the tragedy, and turns it so that the people usually at the edge of the frame are in the middle of it. Guerra himself said of Embrace that black and white gives it "this dreamlike quality, where man and nature become the same", and for long stretches that is exactly what Gallego's photography does.

What does not work is the talking. Our caveat on Embrace was that it says its point out loud too often; a film that has spent an hour making its case with faces and water does not need anyone to summarise it, and yet people keep doing so. Some have felt that Waiting for the Barbarians lost the closeness of the Colombian films when it went abroad. We have not seen enough of it to judge, but the worry fits what we saw upriver: the further Guerra gets from the canoe, the more he explains.

He is now a director who works in English, on other people's books, with more money behind him. Whether the canoe can carry all that is the question of his next decade, and we would rather he found out with David Gallego behind the camera.