He made his first film,
Wandering Shadows, in 2004 at the age of 23. The film was selected as Colombian submission for
Best Foreign Language Film at the
78th Academy Awards, but it was not nominated. His next film,
The Wind Journeys, competed in the
Un Certain Regard section at the
2009 Cannes Film Festival and was selected as Colombian submission for Best Foreign Language Film at the
82nd Academy Awards; it also was not selected. His 2015 film
Embrace of the Serpent was screened in the
Directors' Fortnight section at the
2015 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the C.I.C.A.E. Award. It won the Best Film award in the International Film Festivals of
Odesa and Lima, where it also received a special prize from the Critics Jury. The film was also among the nominees for
Best Foreign Language Film at the
88th Academy Awards, being the first Colombian film ever to be nominated. On 22 November 2017,
Netflix ordered the limited series
Green Frontier to production.
Green Frontier is based on an original idea from Diego Ramírez Schrempp and Jenny Ceballos of Dynamo Producciones. Guerra is credited as an executive producer of the series, alongside, Diego Ramírez Schrempp, Andrés Calderón, Jorge Dorado and Cristian Conti. The series was directed by Guerra,
Laura Mora Ortega and Jacques Toulemonde Vidal and written by Mauricio Leiva-Cock, Antón Goenechea, Camila Brugrés, Gibrán Portela, Javier Peñalosa, María Camila Arias,
Natalia Santa and Nicolás Serrano. The miniseries premiered on
Netflix on 16 August 2019. In 2018, Guerra released his fourth feature film,
Birds of Passage, which was filmed in
La Guajira Desert, Colombia. Guerra states that it is "like a gangster film, but something completely different from any gangster film that you have ever seen". Guerra has also directed an
adaptation of
J. M. Coetzee's novel
Waiting for the Barbarians, starring
Mark Rylance,
Johnny Depp,
Robert Pattinson,
Gana Bayarsaikhan, and
Greta Scacchi. The film premiered at the
Venice Film Festival on 6 September 2019, and was released on 7 August 2020, by Samuel Goldwyn Films. He was the jury president of the
International Critics' Week section of the
2019 Cannes Film Festival. ==Personal life==