The Pacific coast is a fascinating part of Colombia. Highways have not yet arrived to many parts of the area, and the only way to get to some towns is by boat or airplane. Being that many of the residents of the Pacific coast are poor black fisherman, they don’t get a lot of chances to get out, and it feels isolated, like Colombia’s own Deliverance-like south. I didn’t see more than a couple other gringo tourists while I was there, and even Colombians from other regions were not numerous.
La Barra is an isolated village in this neck of the woods where the movie takes place, a real town that is actually in the department of Valle de Cauca on the Pacific coast, close to Buenaventura and just south of Choco. There is a white guy called “Paisa” (Jaime Andres Castano) meaning he is from the region surrounding Medellin, who wants to build a hotel on the beach, mirroring the real-life situation of Paisas buying up cheap land in the town of La Villa to build surf hostels on the shore. Daniel (Rodrigo Velez) is a guy who comes from some hip urban enclave. He wants to find a motorboat out of the region so that he can continue his backpacking. Daniel has problems; he looks at a woman’s photo from time to time, but we are never quite sure what’s wrong with him. He is travelling on the cheap and stays with Cerebro (Brain, played by Arnobio Salazar Rivas), a local fisherman with money problems. There seems to be no fish in the waters nearby, so Brain has no cash, and all the motorboats are far away, leaving Daniel stranded. Daniel’s money is robbed, so he has to help Cerebro with things like cleaning debris on the beach to pay his room and board. The Paisa, meanwhile, disrupts the quiet village with loud speakers that blast reggaeton. The Paisa has the modern rights to the land, but the Afro-Colombians have lived here since the days when slaves escaped from their masters to hide in the jungle, and resent the interloper.
The movie moves sloooow. It plods lethargically with the same general rhythm of daily life in the region, capturing the way that people don’t seem to measure time in the same manner over there. Much like the Daniel in the film, I was looking for a boat from Bahia Solano to Buenaventura to continue on my journey when I was travelling through the region, and there were no schedules or guarantees that one would even arrive. Sometimes a boat came, sometimes it didn’t. I felt like a total uptight Gringo looking for some sort of timetable. The beaches and jungle are unspoiled as of now; the Paisa’s “development” in the film is not much more than some cabanas and a fence made of plywood to make a claim on the beach, which the Afro-Colombians have no trouble dismantling. The area gets less sunshine than the Caribbean coast, and of course paramilitaries and guerrillas lurking in the local jungles haven’t helped make tourism much of a burgeoning industry in that region. The film captures a sense of this part of Colombia as one of the last frontiers, still surrounded by thick, difficult rain forest and full of people eking out a living off the land. But modernity is coming, in the form of outsiders with disposable income for travel and investment. The film is uneasy about how these foreigners will change the culture and environment of the Pacific coast, even as the changes are pretty much inevitable.
Technically, Afro-Colombians in this part of Colombia have their rights protected by constitutional court decisions to be in control of their heritage, including the lands they have settled, to avoid exploitation by outsiders. However, many Afro-Colombians have subpar literacy, and are unaware of their rights, making them easy targets for narcos, palm oil and mining companies, and illegally armed groups seeking to drive them off their land. A constitutional provision that guarantees a land title to rural Afro-Colombian communities that have organized loosely as a group and occupied their property for 10 years or more does exist, but is often difficult to enforce. As the descendants of escaped slaves once again begin to feel the effects of oppression, will they run or defend what is rightfully theirs? It is the rhetorical question at the heart of this film, and it lingers uncomfortably afterwards without an answer.
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