Cielo

Bluesky

There are few places on Earth where the land and the sky seem so close together as in the highlands of Bolivia. There, on the shore of a mountain lake, an eight-year-old indigenous girl takes off her hat. Dipping it into the water, she catches a golden fish, which she promptly swallows whole before collapsing. Don’t worry. This is not the last we’ll see of either of them.

The girl is Santa – meaning ‘saint’, of course, and nothing to do with Mr. Claus. She is a deeply religious child and she is about to commit a murder. Well, arguably two murders, but she doesn’t perceive the second one that way; and perhaps, after seeing her vomit out the fish and restore it to health in a bucket, we shouldn’t either. Little hints will follow of the brutality of life as she experienced it in her village home. Her mother told her that there was a better place where they would go one day and be happy together – that all they would need to do would be to follow the stars to the place by the sea where they would disappear, and then a door would open to them. Santa has acquired a map of the stars. By ingenious means, she hefts her mother’s body into a barrel and packs it with salt to keep it fresh. She, the barrel and the fish set off across the salt flats on a cart, planning to go directly to Heaven.

A stunningly realised piece of magical realism quite different from anything that writer/director Alberto Sciamma has created before, Cielo is a splendid addition to the Fantasia 2025 line-up. It draws on the natura beauty of the country’s varied landscapes, from the copper of the flats under the sinking sun to the cerulean blue of the noonday sky, and the rich green of the forested slopes with their perilous, winding roads, little changed since the days of the Incas.

Along the way, Santa meets equally vivid characters. There’s a priest who has a history of paying people with glowing stars in lieu of money, who tries to give her good advice but is tempted by potatoes. There are luchadoras who step in when it emerges that fish don’t know how to fix engines, who might be looking to exploit her but also offer excitement and real affection. There’s a sad police chief who can’t get over the death of his wife three years ago, and whose ragged moustache sums up his despair. To all of them Santa speaks her mind, plain but fair. She will not be swayed from her mission. In the presence of such certainty, even the strongest cynics begin to waver.

In the central role, newcomer Fernanda Gutiérrez Aranda is fantastic. There’s just enough youthful vulnerability there, alongside the rest, to make strangers fall in love with her, whilst her po-faced moments offset the comedy elsewhere. This is predominantly of the absurdist variety, occasionally giving way to slapstick, and it blends nicely with the strangeness of what the film presents as real events. Through these, Sciamma creates the opportunity for adults – in the film itself, and in the audience – to re-engager with the mysterious qualities of the world as seen from a child’s perspective. Anything seems possible, and yet it’s important to see plans through, and to have faith in a better future. To make things possible, we need first to imagine them, to share in the landscape of celluloid dreams.

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