Haifa International Film Festival hosts Spanish director's ‘Cielo’ film
Spanish director Alberto Sciamma's film 'Cielo' recently premiered at the 42nd Haifa International Film Festival. The magical-realist movie follows a young girl from rural Bolivia on a journey to find heaven, reflecting the director's personal impressions of the country.
Why it matters
The film highlights the intersection of international cinema and the portrayal of rural poverty and indigenous culture in Bolivia.
A little girl sits in front of a spectacularly beautiful lake in rural Bolivia and captures a fish, a moment that is the starting point for Alberto Sciamma's allegorical, magical-realist film, Cielo, which just had its Israeli premiere at the 42nd Haifa International Film Festival.From there, the movie moves in directions that no viewer could anticipate, as it tells the tale of Santa (Fernanda Gutiérrez Aranda) as she sets off, with only her fish for company, to try to find a way to visit the only place she has ever heard of that offers relief from the rural poverty in which she has grown up: Heaven.Along the way, she comes closer to the urban reality of modern life, as savage as the wild landscape she left behind, and encounters a priest, a group of bold indigenous female wrestlers, and a lonely policeman.Sciamma, a Spanish-born director who is now based in…
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