Plot

Tuza, a tough and dominant fisherwoman, will have to help Luvina on a quest that will confront them with their desires and loneliness.

Tuza is a woman who lives in her wooden boat that slides along the floors of a wealthy houses. She and her assistant Justino "fishes" some objects to steal and resell them. When Justin drowns, Tuza is forced to notify Justino's wife, Luvina who asks her for help to go and find the body of her late husband, before the buzzards arrives and eat him.

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