The Sky Turns

Colour, 35 mm
Spain, 2005, 110 min
Section: Documentary Films in Competition

Synopsis

Mercedes Álvarez was three years old when her parents decided to quit the village of La Aldea at the end of the 1960s. Today, only fourteen inhabitants live in this barren corner of northern Spain, a generation which is probably ending over a thousand years of uninterrupted settlement. The director, incidentally the last child to be born in La Aldea, returns after many years to the land of her ancestors to film a portrait of this God-forsaken land with its handful of settlers. With the patience of those who try to stop the flow of time, she records what are at first glance ordinary yet unique moments (villagers at work or in conversation), whose uniqueness lies in being situated between eternity and the approaching end. Life in La Aldea is disappearing before our eyes, just as inexorably as the bright colours on the canvases of the Old Masters, which the captivating visual images of this Spanish documentary distantly resemble. The film was one of this year’s three winners of the Tiger Award for Best Film at the Rotterdam IFF. 

About the director

Mercedes Álvarez (b. 1966, La Aldea, Spain), after making the short film The African Wind (El viento africano, 1997), began studying documentary film at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. As a film editor she shared in the making of the noteworthy film by José Luis Guerín Work in Progress (En construcción, 2001) which was awarded several prizes at San Sebastian and was also screened at the Karlovy Vary IFF in 2002.