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Films about Colombian Indigenous communities are few and far between, with perhaps Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra’s 2018 “Birds of Passage” among the last of the large-scale ones.
For Colombian multi-hyphenate Yull
Núñez, whose credits include “Birds of Passage” and Guerra’s 2009 “The Wind Journeys” where he played the lead, his sophomore feature, “The Cry of Serankwa” (“El grito de Serankwa”), aims to approach the scale and ambition of those films.
Latin American distributor Cineplex has snapped up the Colombian and Latin American rights to the Indigenous eco-thriller, which won three industry prizes at the Santiago Film Festival (Sanfic) where it competed in the WIP Iberoamericana section.
“From the moment we read the script for ‘The Cry of Serankwa,’ we felt a strong connection to its story and its portrayal of the sacred territories of Colombia’s Iku, Wiwa, Kogui and Kankwamo communities in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta,” said Cineplex’s Elba McAllister.
“The film explores our relationship with nature, the preservation of ancestral traditions and the challenges these communities face in the modern world. Much of it is spoken in the Iku language, offering a remarkable immersion into the community’s ancestral worldview. We’re delighted to support its distribution across Colombia and Latin America and believe it will resonate with audiences both within and beyond the region. It’s sure to generate plenty of conversation in 2027.”
The drama centers on two friends of the Indigenous Iku tribe, Marcelo and Aníbal, who are preparing to become spiritual leaders, known as Mamus, to save Mother Earth from the destruction wrought by humans, particularly the mining companies laying waste to their sacred lands. After failing to become a Mamu, Aníbal leaves for the city and returns years later as an engineer with a mining firm, jeopardizing his village and his friendship with Marcelo, the new guardian of the Sierra.
Serankwa is the god of these Indigenous communities. According to Núñez, who hails from Colombia’s Caribbean coast and is of Afro-Colombian descent, he started writing the story in 2017.
“I’ve always had deep ties with this community as my father would take me along on visits when I was a child,” he told Variety.
They filmed for 40 days in the remote mountain village of Nabuzimake, which is closed off to the rest of the world. He wears beaded bracelets that allows him access to this territory where the Iku language is spoken.
“This is more than just a film; it is a cinematic offering that invites us to reflect on our relationship with the environment and with life and death,” he says.
To prepare his mostly natural actors, he held a three-month acting workshop, putting his acting coach and casting skills to work. He’s also run an audiovisual collective in the last four years to train aspiring crew members.
Winning three prizes at Sanfic Industria will help him complete his film which has gone through a development trajectory that included a script development residency with Desde la Raíz foundation; Lenguas Originarias in Lima, Peru; MAR at the Cartagena Film Festival; the Regional Office of Colombia’s Ministry of Culture and Berlinale Talents Toolbox.
The project also received funding from Colombia’s Film Development Fund (FDC) and the ERA Fund of the Manos Visibles Foundation.
Environmental issues have always been front and center in his films. His debut feature, “The Palafite’s Silence” (“El silencio de los palafits”), which world premiered at the Havana Film Festival, follows Elías, a young fisherman who struggles to earn enough to survive after an environmental disaster devastates his stilt-house village. It opens Nov. 12 in Colombia.
His third feature film, now in development, “The Mystery of the Guatapuri” (“El misterio del Guatapuri”), centers on a solitary shaman who sabotages efforts to divert the Guatapurí River to irrigate rice fields, threatening the river’s fragile ecosystem.
As always, he produces this alongside his producing partner Daylín Vega of Cinequipos Prods.
Sanfic ran Nov. 2-8.
