“The Crab Trap” or “El Vuelco del cangrejo” won’t give you closure. Part of the dramatic tension is created from our false expectations…that we will learn the answers to questions and how things are connected. Loose ends aren’t tied up and there’s no justice, just unanswered questions and unrest.

A light-skinned man with a shaved head, Daniel (Rodrigo Velez), is tramping through the jungle, on the way to a small town called La Barra. La Barra is a town that seems forgotten by time and the marine life. On the Pacific coast, La Barra is populated by African descendants.  There have no industry except fishing.

Daniel carries only a backpack and wishes to flee the country. We see clips of the political unrest, but how does this touch Daniel if at all. Daniel hopes to hire a boat to leave the country, but the shortage of fish has forced the fishermen in the town to go farther and farther away in search of fish.

In La Barra, there is only rice. While Daniel waits for the men to return, he befriends a young girl, Lucia (Yisela Alvarez), and he watches as another newcomer to the town attempts to run off the villagers. The villagers may have lived there for many, many generations, but El Paisa (Jaime Andres Castano) has legal ownership of the land. El Paisa hopes to drive people who have no money and nowhere to go off their land in order to build a resort on this beach.

Like El Paisa, Lucia has her own agenda. So does the beautiful Jazmin (Karent Hinestroza) who already has a baby to care for and cooks for the local wise man and village leader, Cerebro (Arnobio Salazar). Jazmin is pursued by El Paisa.

According to an article in Twitchfilm.net, Oscar Ruiz Navia directed this movie which is partially based on real life. There is a village called El Barra. The people are poor. It is on the coast of Colombia. A man named Cerebro lives there. This remote village of black people  isn’t the Colombia that tourists know. The film is part documentary, part drama and part personal social commentary.

The subtext about violence, drugs and war is an indirect statement on the “plastic bubble” that certain filmmakers create when they don’t want to discuss certain things. Intolerance and the urge to escape are seen on a small scale to focus on the larger scale problem according to the Twitch Film interview with Navia.  Navia and his family were familiar with El Barra where he had visited on vacations and the movie is inspired by real events.

Yet one of the things you feel is Navia’s affection for the natural, unspoiled locale. Set against a jungle, without many of the conveniences of modern life, El Barra is not the kind of place for a Club Med vacation.

You’ll have to put aside all your expectations of how movies should build and end, and even how beach vacations should look. While Daniel is too involved in his desire to flee the country to enjoy Navia’s favorite vacation destination, isn’t that like so many of us wherever we are?

Colombia/France. In Spanish with English subtitles. (95 minutes).