Dreams Travel With the Wind review – communing with the spirits to preserve Indigenous culture in Colombia

This intensely personal film follows Colombian director Inti Jacanamijoy’s grandfather to the ancestral lands of the Wayuu people Spirituality and history collide in Inti Jacanamijoy’s debut documentary, shot among the rugged, enigmatic terrain of La Guajira, Colombia, the birthplace of his grandfather, José Agustín. Now in his 90s, the older man muses on the inevitability of death, all while looking back on his painful upbringing as a Wayuu Indigenous person . His voiceover, laid over the sight of lush forest and babbling brooks, recalls a cruel separation from his mother and his ancestral land, forced by Catholic invaders. This sense of fracture resonates throughout the family lineage. Jacanamijoy too speaks of his feelings of loss caused by generational trauma. Against such emotional and geographical disconnects, the film looks to dreams – and even the afterlife – as a possible space for reconciliation and healing. José Agustín’s mother has long passed, yet he often sees her in hi...

Black Flies review – Sean Penn paramedic drama tries to grapple the horror

Fresh-faced rookie Tye Sheridan is led through a world of medical grimness by a grizzled Penn in a tale full of lifeless cliche

There are some strident cliches alongside redundant self-harming machismo in this sub-Schraderesque movie about New York paramedics, directed by Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire and adapted from the novel by Shannon Burke. Sirens screaming and faces emoting, they battle through another dark-night-of-the-soul as they deal with gang shootings, domestic assaults, homeless people dying and crack addicts giving birth in hovels. They are often assigned the futile chore of attending to corpses discovered in decaying buildings, surrounded by black flies – but aren’t all the other patients just corpses in waiting? And so the black flies of horror start buzzing into their brains.

Tye Sheridan co-stars as Ollie, the standard-issue Hollywood rookie, a fresh-faced young ambulance guy from Colorado (of all the poignantly innocent places) paired in time-honoured style with a grizzled old-timer. This is the seen-it-all Gene Rutkovsky, appropriately nicknamed “Rut”, a veteran of a million horrors, including 9/11, played by Sean Penn. Fights break out among the guys back at the station house and Mike Tyson has a cameo as the grouchy chief who has to keep everyone in line.

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