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 Odessa and Lima, where it also received a special prize by 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.
Guerra will make his Hollywood debut directing an adaptation of the dystopian adventure book The Detainee by Peter Liney, which will be written by Grant Myers. Guerra is working on two other films: Birds of a Passage, which will be shot in 2017 in La Guajira Desert (Guerra states that it is "like a gangster film, but something completely different from any gangster film that you have ever seen",) and an adaptation of J. M. Coetzee's novel Waiting for the Barbarians, starring Mark Rylance.
