MANOS SUCIAS World Cinema

For young men in Buenaventura, Colombia – a dangerous area policed by paramilitaries and poisoned by the drug trade – the prospect of a better life requires getting out of Buenaventura. And getting out means getting your hands dirty. Such is the case for Jacobo and Delio, estranged brothers who agree to transport millions of dollars’ worth of cocaine up the coast and into Panama for a quick payday. Equipped only with a rickety motorboat and the coordinates of their destination, the two embark on a journey which inevitably veers into unexpected and violent detours. Josef Kubota Wladyka’s feature debut – filmed on location in Colombia and based on real-life accounts from families in the region – strips away the notion of a glamorous and exciting drug trade, instead offering a spare, intensely suspenseful portrait of lives forever altered by an unimaginably brutal system of power.