Ciro Guerra

Biography

Ciro Alfonso Guerra Picón (Río de Oro, Cesar, 6 February 1981) is a Colombian film director and screenwriter, best known for Embrace of the Serpent (2015), which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. His work is part of a new wave of Latin American auteur cinema that reached wide international audiences while staying rooted in its own landscapes.

Guerra studied film and television at the National University of Colombia and made several short films before his feature debut, Wandering Shadows, in 2004, at the age of 23. It was Colombia's Oscar submission for Best Foreign Language Film but was not nominated. His second feature, The Wind Journeys, competed in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes in 2009 and was again chosen as Colombia's Oscar entry, without earning a nomination.

His international breakthrough came with Embrace of the Serpent, shown in the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes in 2015, where it won the C.I.C.A.E. Award. The film took the best film prize at the Odesa and Lima festivals and became the first Colombian film nominated in the Academy's foreign language category. Guerra also worked in television as an executive producer of the Netflix miniseries Green Frontier, which premiered in 2019, and he shared directing duties on it with other filmmakers.

In 2018 he released Birds of Passage, shot in the La Guajira desert and selected as Colombia's entry for the 91st Academy Awards. A year later he directed Waiting for the Barbarians, his first English-language feature, an adaptation of J. M. Coetzee's novel starring Mark Rylance and Johnny Depp, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival.

In 2020 the feminist outlet Volcánicas published anonymous testimonies accusing Guerra of sexual harassment. He denied the claims and pursued legal action. None of the accusations was established in any court, and no formal charges were ever brought. His career is therefore best read alongside a controversy that remains part of public debate in Colombia.

Key films

• Wandering Shadows (2004): feature debut and Colombia's Oscar submission.
• The Wind Journeys (2009): premiered in Un Certain Regard at Cannes and was again Colombia's Oscar entry.
• Embrace of the Serpent (2015): nominated for Best Foreign Language Film and the central work of his career.
• Birds of Passage (2018): co-directed with Cristina Gallego, a gangster-style drama set in La Guajira.
• Waiting for the Barbarians (2019): his first English-language film, starring Mark Rylance and Johnny Depp.