In recent years, Colombian cinema has grown beyond the clichés of narco narratives and urban violence. These five films, bold in both form and spirit, chart a different path — one of ancestral memory, mysticism, war, and survival, all rooted in the visual richness and spiritual contradictions of the Colombian landscape. From the depths of the Amazon to the heights of the Andes, from dreamlike odysseys to brutal survivalist tales, these films speak with a voice that is at once local and universal.

The Wind Journeys (Colombia, 2009) – Music as a Path to Redemption

In this quiet, poetic road movie by Ciro Guerra, an aging accordion player and his young apprentice travel across the Colombian north to return a cursed instrument. Filled with haunting silence, mystic landscapes, and the vanishing rhythms of vallenato, the film is a meditation on death, pride, and the weight of tradition. Guerra films Colombia as a vast spiritual territory, where music binds and separates people in equal measure.

Birds of Passage (Colombia, 2018) – The Drug Trade, Before the Tropes

Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra co-direct this mythic tale of a Wayuu family’s descent into the drug business in the 1970s. It’s a narco story, yes, but reimagined through indigenous codes of honor, family, and cosmology. With hypnotic visuals and a Shakespearean sense of tragedy, Birds of Passage explores the cost of losing one’s roots in pursuit of modern wealth. The desert here is both sacred and cursed, and violence comes dressed in feathers and rituals.

The Kings of the World (Colombia, 2022) – Freedom on the Margins

In this raw and hallucinatory journey, a group of street kids from Medellín head into the countryside in search of a plot of land promised to one of them. Part fable, part neorealist descent into madness, the film blurs the line between dream and nightmare. With untrained actors, fragmented structure, and poetic imagery, it’s a visceral portrait of dispossession, youth, and the fleeting taste of freedom.

Monos (Colombia, 2019) – War Without a Name

Alejandro Landes’s Monos throws us into the surreal world of child soldiers on a misty mountaintop, watching over a hostage. Both primal and futuristic, the film feels like Lord of the Flies filtered through Apocalypse Now. Chaos reigns, alliances collapse, and the jungle devours both ideology and innocence. With Mica Levi’s pulsating score and breathtaking cinematography, Monos is a terrifying and strangely beautiful war film without politics, only instinct.

Embrace of the Serpent (Colombia, 2015) – Memory as Resistance

Shot in stark black and white, this dual-timeline Amazonian journey follows an indigenous shaman and two Western scientists decades apart. A film about colonialism, science, spirituality, and environmental devastation, it reverses the usual roles: here, the native is the guide, the thinker, the holder of truth. The river is both path and poison. Ciro Guerra’s masterpiece is an anti-exploration film, deeply philosophical and hypnotically slow, where silence holds more meaning than speech.

These films prove that Colombian cinema is not afraid to take risks, both in subject matter and cinematic form. Whether in Spanish, Wayuu, Embera or silence, they echo with deep questions about identity, land, violence, and dreams. Watch them not just as stories from Colombia — but as visions from its soul.