In modern movie terminology, “epic” usually just means long, crowded and grandiose. “Birds of Passage,” Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra’s follow-up to their astonishing, hallucinatory, Oscar-nominated “Embrace of the Serpent,” earns the label in a more honest and rigorous manner. Parts of the story are narrated by a blind singer — a literally Homeric figure — and the story itself upholds Ezra Pound’s definition of the epic as “a poem containing history.” It’s about how the world changes, about how individual actions and the forces of fate work in concert to bring glory and ruin to a hero and his family.

The history in question, divided into five chapters, involves the Colombian drug trade from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, but the film defies narco-drama clichés and superficial period atmosphere. Set among the Wayuu of northern Colombia (an Indigenous population whose language and customs survived the Spanish conquest and the rise of the modern nation-state), it also resists the temptations of exoticism and hazy magic realism. Even as you may be reminded of other sweeping chronicles of fortunes made and souls undone by ambition and greed — “Giant,” “The Godfather,” even “Breaking Bad” — your perception of the world is likely to be permanently altered. The experience made me think of some of my favorite movies (I’ll add Visconti’s “La Terra Trema” to the list), but it’s also like nothing I’ve ever seen before.

Not only because of the cultural and geographic milieu, which may be as unfamiliar to many Colombians as it will be to most North American viewers. The landscape the Wayuu inhabit, on a peninsula jutting into the Caribbean, includes patches of desert and lush, green hillsides. Mostly ranchers and farmers, the Wayuu conduct trade and manage potential conflict through a system based on ritualized exchange and communication. A family’s honor is bound up with its word, and certain members, designated “messengers of the word” are treated with special deference. “Don’t shoot the messenger” is close to a sacred principle.