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| FANTASIA |
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| CIELO |
In Cielo, director Alberto Sciamma delivers not just a film but an act of cinematic grace — a testament to the spiritual and emotional capacities of storytelling that rarely arrives in such raw, transcendent form. At once visually sumptuous, narratively unpredictable, and emotionally revelatory, Cielo is a Bolivian-set tale that fuses magical realism with the bruising truths of human suffering and hope, in the tradition of the best South American literature. You don’t watch this movie so much as you are drawn into its spell, as if by celestial gravity.
At the center of this beguiling vision is Santa — not a saint, not yet — a young girl portrayed with astonishing sincerity by newcomer Fernanda Gutiérrez Aranda. She lives high in the Bolivian Altiplano, a place of impossible beauty: jagged peaks, glacial lakes like mirrors to the divine, clouds like lost ships sailing across the sky. Santa’s world, however, is anything but heavenly. She’s caught between her gentle, warm mother Paz (Carla Arana) and her brutal, liquor-soaked father (Juan Carlos Aduviri), whose violence simmers beneath every interaction like a stormcloud behind a mountain.
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| On the left: John Dunton-Downer: on the right: Alberto Sciamma who were present for the screening and answer questions from the audience. Photos © LENA GHIO, 2025 |
One day, Santa decides she must take her mother to Heaven. Not symbolically. Literally. And so begins a journey through landscapes as strange and sacred as the human heart.
What Cielo offers in narrative is less a plotted arc than a migration of spirit. It shares the bones of a fairy tale — a girl on a quest, a cruel father, miraculous helpers — but it resists the saccharine polish of modern fables. This is magical realism in the oldest, truest sense: the impossible revealed not as escapism, but as a way of telling the emotional truth more clearly than realism alone ever could.
From its first unsettling image — Santa calmly catching and swallowing a live fish — we are alerted that logic will not be our guide through this film. That fish, like so many recurring symbols in Cielo, reappears throughout the journey: sometimes alive, sometimes dead, sometimes regurgitated whole. It becomes talisman, companion, question mark. Santa speaks to it. Others dream of it. It may be a soul, or faith, or a memory — or it may simply be a fish. Cielo never over-explains. It invites belief rather than demands understanding.
Along her journey, Santa encounters figures that feel lifted from dream or parable: a grieving policeman with a tender secret behind his macho mustache (Fernando Arze Echalar), a skeptical priest (Luis Bredow) whose cynicism cracks open when confronted with possibility, and a troupe of female Cholita wrestlers who briefly become her guardians. These characters are not mere color or comic relief; they are transformed by Santa’s conviction, as if her very presence evokes something holy in the brokenness of others. One wonders if she is a prophet, a saint, or merely a child who refuses to stop believing.
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| Fernanda Gutiérrez Aranda greeting us from Bolivia. Photos © LENA GHIO, 2025 |
Sciamma’s direction here is nothing short of audacious. Cielo dances across genres — part road movie, part fantasy, part spiritual drama, part social critique — yet always anchored by emotional truth. Just when you settle into one rhythm, the film slides into another: a moment of gutting violence follows a vision of grace; surreal comedy bubbles beneath grief. The tonal tightrope Sciamma walks is narrow and high, but he never stumbles.
He’s aided immeasurably by cinematographer Alex Metcalfe, whose lens finds grandeur in both the vast and the intimate. The high Andean terrain is shot with reverence, light catching on ice, shadows painting mountain curves. Yet equally stunning are the scenes of Santa and her mother, framed in tight, glowing compositions that transform simple acts — bathing, cooking, braiding hair — into rituals of love and endurance. Their clothes, in vivid reds and blues against the blue sky, seem almost otherworldly, reminding us that color, too, is language.
The comparison to filmmakers like Jean-Claude Lauzon (Léolo) or André Forcier is apt — there’s a similarly defiant surrealism here, a refusal to bow to realism as the only form of truth. But Cielo feels entirely its own creation, drawing on Bolivian myth, Catholic iconography, and Indigenous cosmology with a light but reverent touch. It understands that belief is not a weakness, but a way through suffering.
That suffering is never sanitized. Like the oldest fairy tales — the ones before Disney got to them — Cielo acknowledges that magic doesn’t erase pain. If anything, it heightens it. Miracles come at a cost. People die. Love fails. But even amid this, wonder persists. A dead condor flies again. A wound closes without explanation. A child keeps walking toward Heaven, fish in hand, faith intact.
What’s perhaps most miraculous about Cielo is how it makes the viewer feel these things not as metaphors, but as experiences. It does not tell you what to think. It gives you images and emotion, and trusts you to meet it halfway. It moves you to tears — and you may not even know why. The effect is cumulative, almost alchemical. You leave the cinema changed, or at least reminded that change is possible.
Fernanda Gutiérrez Aranda’s performance deserves special praise. It is rare to see a child actor carry such emotional weight without ever seeming coached or precious. She is not precocious, not “cute,” but elemental — her gaze unflinching, her voice quiet but sure. She believes in Heaven, and by the end, somehow, so do we.
Is there a Heaven in this film? Does Santa arrive? Sciamma withholds easy answers. What matters is the journey, and what is discovered along the way: courage, grace, forgiveness, beauty. Whether or not she finds Heaven, she brings a little of it with her. And that, ultimately, is the miracle of Cielo.
At the Fantasia International Film Festival, where genre often reigns supreme, Cielo feels like a quiet revolution. It doesn’t scream. It whispers, and then, somehow, it sings. For those willing to surrender to its rhythm, its mysteries, its fish and flying birds, its blood and starlight — Cielo offers a cinema of the soul.
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