Manos Sucias offers a refreshingly authentic perspective on race and poverty in the Colombian drugs trade
 
Manos Sucias charts the adventures of two previously estranged Afro-Colombian brothers as they make their way across the Pacific to transport drugs. The premise is simple enough, but there is more to the narrative than meets the eye.
The film places its glaring emphasis on the racism running rife in Colombia, which is unsurprising considering it is a directorial debut by Spike Lee’s protégé: Josef Wladyka. Lee, who produces the film, is known for his stridently honest portrayals of race in America with films such as Malcolm X and Do the Right Thing, so it’s no surprise that he’s thrown his weight behind this project.
The film is set and shot in the Colombian port city of Buenaventura, where poverty, high unemployment and crime intermingle. Delio is a 19-year-old man whose restlessness draws him away from the humdrum of the city and into the arms of local drug traffickers. His older brother, Jacabo, is the chalk to Delio’s cheese: a conservative, tight-lipped fisherman whose past is enshrouded by emotional trauma. When they meet after years of separation, both are seeking escape for very different reasons.
The plot seems somewhat predictable and undercooked as we witness the various obstacles facing Jacabo and Delio. An emotionally fraught relationship, hashed out on a boat off the Pacific, provides a turbulent and slightly clichéd background to most of Manos Sucias. There is no doubt that this was well performed by lead actors Cristian James Abvincula and Jarlin Javier Martinez. However, to focus on this aspect alone is to negate the film’s most pertinent truths.
These truths manifest themselves through the racialised language of the film, in which Wladyka successfully depicts the power structures at play on the ground. High-level traffickers are portrayed as Caucasian Colombians, while the residents of Buenaventura are impoverished Afro-Colombians. The tone is set by the opening exchanges between Jacabo and an unknown drug lord, who addresses him as “blacky.” References are made to the capital of Colombia, Bogotá, but only to state the fact that “there are no black people in Bogotá”.
Dehumanising language is cleverly littered throughout the dialogue, which underlines the crossroads where verbal and physical violence meet. The most shocking of these episodes occurs when one of the gang’s drug enforcers (Hadder Blandon) engages in a remorselessly foul, racist tirade while accompanying the two brothers. What starts as a jovial conversation about the best footballer in South America ends in verbal platitudes that leave Delio incensed, and Jacabo darting a glance at his younger sibling to calm him down.
Wladkya demonstrates a refreshingly conscious understanding of racial distinctions in Colombia and South America as a whole. Mainstream directors often render race as invisible in their representations of worlds that have apparently been set in the 21st-century. As a result, they fall into depicting societies devoid of the auspices of white supremacy. Manos Sucias treads a very different path by presenting a world where class and race intersect.
“Dirty Hands,” the translation of the film’s Spanish title, highlights the very real truth of the ways in which drug trafficking is habitually racialised. The poorest are inevitably the ones desperate enough to undertake dangerous voyages to transport drugs, and they are often the darkest in skin colour in this context. What Manos Sucias may lack in seamless oeuvre, it more than makes up for in its subtly provocative message.
Manos Sucias screened at the East End Film Festival on 9 July 2015. We are partnering with Mydylarama to bring you broader coverage of select film festivals.

Photo Credits: East End Film Festival