Credits: screenplay: Oscar Ruíz Navia; director of photography: Sofía Oggioni Hatty, Andrés Pineda; editor: Felipe Guerrero; sound: Miguel Vargas, Frédéric Thery, Isabel Torres; producer: Diana Bustamante Escobar, Guillaume de Seille, Oscar Ruíz Navia, Gerylee Polanco; production: Contravía Films, Diana Bustamante, Arizona Films;

Country: Columbia, France

Year: 2009

Running time: 95

Colour: Colour

Format: 35 mm

In Oscar Ruiz Navia’s CRAB TRAP, a no-budget first feature from Colombia, a white man from the city named Daniel ventures to an Afro-Colombian community of ex-slaves on the Pacific coast called La Barra in order to find a boat to escape something. We don’t know what, and it doesn’t matter. What does matter is the unhurried lifestyle in this poor but proud village, how this visitor begins to conform to it, and how Ruiz Navia respects the culture by filming the residents at an appropriate tempo. The drama is more about the locals than about Daniel or another white man, Paisa, an exploiter who wants to develop the area no matter what the cost to those who have lived there for generations. The natural setting is unsettling rather than comforting. There is no disjunction between the tough lives of the impoverished people of La Barra and the threatening, and threatened, seaside location. Howard Feinstein