Before the Buzzards Arrive

Within the surroundings of a misty dreamscape, Tuva rows her small wooden boat from one bourgeois living room to the next, casting her net to fish for the treasures that are her livelihood. She is helped by Justino, a superstitious and cautious man whose wife Luvina feels trapped in her home, where she is determined to shoot all the raucous birds out of the sky. When Justino has a dreadful accident, Tuva and Luvina’s paths collide as they try to find his corpse before it rots away and is devoured by buzzards.

Part tragic love story, part psychological drama, Before the Buzzards Arrive is an oneiric, magical-realist fantasia that examines the ways in which people – and particularly women – are confined by the socially constructed roles they come to inhabit. Further to this, the film wonders poignantly whether escape from one such oppressive set of circumstances merely results in becoming trapped in another. Unfolding like a delicate reverie in a universe fully informed by its own logic, it accomplishes what any dream worth its salt does: it haunts us with notions that make the real world seem fragile, bizarre and at times grotesque.

– Nicholas Davies