FFCC chair Hans Morgenstern and FFCC member Juan Barquin had a chance to preview several movies premiering at Miami Dade College’s Miami Festival’s GEMS, a 4-day long film festival in Miami, for the Miami New Times. Both will also participate on a panel at the festival alongside members Ruben Rosario and Alfred Soto following the Florida premiere of Burning by Lee Chang-dong.

Miami Dade College’s Miami Film Festival is back with its annual Gems event of weekend movie premieres at the Tower Theater in Little Havana. This year’s edition will screen several movies likely to become Best Foreign Language Film contenders at next year’s Academy Awards. Here, New Times film critics Juan Antonio Barquin and Hans Morgenstern guide you through picks from an array of continents, including Europe, South America, and Asia, to either see or skip.

Birds of Passage

If you’ve ever wondered about the real story behind the marijuana growers who kicked the illegal drug trade out of Colombia, Birds of Passage is your film. Beginning in 1968 with a scheme to make quick money for a dowry among indigenous tribes, this crime drama is a Shakespearean rumination on greed and how it can tear families apart. Sectioned into five “cantos,” from humble beginnings to rise and fall, the film has an epic quality akin to the Godfather movies.

Ciro Guerra, whose Embrace of the Serpent in 2016 was the first Oscar-nominated movie from Colombia, codirects with longtime producer Cristina Gallego on the film, based on a script by Maria Camila Arias and Jacques Toulemonde Vidal. Whereas his previous film, shot in black-and-white, was a surreal, elliptical rumination on the destruction of ancient Amazonian wisdom by colonialists, Birds of Passage follows in brilliantly realized color a straight narrative where action and consequence smack into each other like rows of falling dominoes…

(Read the rest in the Miami New Times)