What exactly is “heaven”? And how far would you go to reach it? Eight-year-old Santa, the protagonist of U.K.-based Spanish writer-director Alberto Sciamma’s Bolivia-shot movie Cielo, is willing to go far, very far, after swallowing a bright yellow fish.
She is not only pulling a cart from her home in the desolate Bolivian Altiplano through vast desert landscapes and driving a big truck, but also ends up meeting a priest, policemen, and an indigenous female wrestling troupe, among others. What drives her is her love for her mother, her desire to save her and herself from an abusive father, and her faith.
The film, starring newcomer Fernanda Gutiérrez Aranda, Fernando Arze Echalar, Sasha Salaverry, Cristian Mercado, Carla Arana, Juan Carlos Aduviri, and Luis Bredow, had its world premiere at Porto, Portugal’s Fantasporto in March, where it won a special jury prize, the audience award, and the best cinematography honor for Alex Metcalfe.
Now, Cielo will get its U.K. premiere at SXSW London on June 6, followed by another screening the following day.
Produced out of the U.K. by Sciamma, John Dunton-Downer, Alexa Waugh, and Bettina Kadoorie through Luchadora Films, with support from Bolivian production company Pucara Films, Film Seekers has come on board as the sales agent for the movie.
Ahead of the London screenings, Sciamma (I Love My Mum) talked to THR about his inspiration for his modern fairytale, working with his charismatic young star and the “cholitas,” the indigenous female wrestlers who have gained popularity in Bolivia, and what is next for him.
‘Cielo’
Courtesy of Luchadora Films
“The movie started with two images,” the filmmaker shares. “I had a very visceral image in my head of a little girl swallowing a fish, and I didn’t really analyze it. I didn’t know why I was fascinated by that image. And then, I had that other image of a little girl pulling a cart in the middle of an unknown landscape. I was doodling and thinking about those images, but I never thought they would become a script.”
So what happened? During the European Film Market of the Berlin Film Festival a few years ago, he met up with his friend Dunton-Downer and his Bolivian wife, who had moved from London to Berlin. “They said: ‘Well, if you need a deserted, exotic landscape, think about Bolivia’. And they opened their family photo album and started to show me photos of Bolivia,” Sciamma recalls. “And I thought those landscapes were incredible.” Inspired, he focused on writing a first draft for the movie within a few weeks.
The movie ended up touching on various spiritual and religious themes and using such religious symbolism as fish and heaven. “I’m not religious myself, but I was born in a very religious country, in Spain,” explains Sciamma. “The hyper-realism of Jesus on the cross and all of these things fascinated me. And I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of faith, because it’s undefinable. I mean: what is faith? The idea is that we have a bunch of primordial questions. Regardless of how many BBC documentaries we see about the sky and the stars and science and whatever, we still look up and think: ‘Okay, I understand all of that, but what is really going on here?’ And these are the questions that shape religion in a way. If we didn’t have those questions, religion wouldn’t exist.”
Don’t call Cielo a religious film, though! “I don’t consider the movie to be a movie about religion,” the writer and director tells THR. “It is a movie of many things – love and family, our insatiable need for redemption, and this universal feeling that we all have of looking for a better place, or trying to be in a better place, trying to find something else. You know, the grass is always greener somewhere else.”
‘Cielo’ film shoot
Courtesy of Luchadora Films
How did Sciamma shape his narrative and focus his tone? “I only had one rule as I was writing: try to do something that is felt [by the audience] rather than analyzed, and something that is full of love, regardless of how savage some of the things that happen are. I still wanted it to be very tender at its core.”
The psychedelic feeling you get when watching the movie is due to the director’s goal of providing a visceral, experiential type of viewing to his audience. “It’s the whole – the images, the colors, the music, the sound,” explains Sciamma. “All of that is designed to take you, hopefully, on a very entertaining ride, a mysterious ride, and sort of hypnotizes you to take you to a place that you didn’t know. Movies that I really love are movies that happened in the spaces that I didn’t know about.”
The filmmaker surprised himself with the final version of the film after watching it during the Porto festival. “When the movie ended, I thought with a smile on my face: ‘What is this? What’s happened here?’” he recalls. “When I was writing and when we were all shooting the movie and collaborating, we were discussing stuff and seeing how we could make everything work. But I never analyzed the movie. It was afterwards that I thought: ‘I better figure out how to explain this thing.’ I hope that it functions as a form of entertainment, as something that is like jumping into a pool, but then the pool transforms into the sea, and then the sea is a river, and things fluctuate and change. You never know what’s around the corner in a way.” Or said differently, “it was designed to take you off center and to transport you” elsewhere, he offers.
Sciamma feels lucky to have found Gutiérrez Aranda as his young star, who was only seven years old when he had his first Zoom meeting with her and her mother and who had never acted before beyond school plays. “When I spoke with her, I realized this girl is incredibly intelligent. And then I discovered that, in fact, she was two or three years ahead in her school, and she was already reading all the Harry Potter books, etc. So, we met her, and we trusted her.”
‘Cielo’ film shoot
Courtesy of Luchadora Films
Sciamma’s guidance for her was simple: “Be yourself, avoid mannerisms,” and don’t try to act out things. “She was the easiest actor I’ve ever worked with, because she didn’t act,” he shares with THR. “She felt absolutely everything. All the tears that you see and the laughter and whatever else are real. She wasn’t faking it. I remember some [very emotional and scary] scenes and moments were very hard for her to do, and I spoke with her and said we can amend the scene, or do it differently. But in general, the only thing I had to do with her was to give her the tone – whether it was serious or jokey.”
The newcomer even adjusted to last-minute changes without difficulty. “For one scene, I changed all the dialogue 20 minutes before we shot it, and she learned all the new lines.”
And he has high hopes for Gutiérrez Aranda’s future. “I would love to work with her again, because she is already a great actor and can go places,” he tells THR. “She’s very talented.”
How was working with actual female luchadors, or wrestlers, playing more or less themselves? “They had never acted, but they are so jovial,” Sciamma shares. “You try to enter that bus they ride around in, and they will start screaming their head off, joking and inventing songs. They were really fun.”
For Salaverry, who plays the wrestler The Reina, the filmmaker adjusted the character from the original script version to one closer to her real-life persona. “In the original script, she was louder. Sasha is more tender,” he tells THR. “So I thought I’m not going to fight that. I’m going to go with it. So I amended the tone of the part.”
‘Cielo’ film shoot BTS
Courtesy of Luchadora Films
Sciamma enjoyed his filming experience in Bolivia so much that he would love to go back there. “Of all the places I have been to for shoots, Bolivia is the only place I will go back to 100 percent. They don’t have [the kind of technology and prop houses and the like of other filming locations]. But they have imagination. Those limitations actually make them really creative,” he explains. “Bolivia is incredible. It has La Paz, it has the dry lands, the desert, it has the mountains, and It has the jungle. So it’s an incredible place with super talented people.”
Sciamma is also hoping to return to the world of Cielo. “I’m sort of writing a part two,” he tells THR. “I always thought that the movie cannot end here, and so I’m writing a continuation of the movie which starts in the jungle, which is a location that we only touched on in some scenes.”
But the sequel script will have to wait to get his proper attention, given that the festival circuit is his near-term focus. Explains the filmmaker: “The way I write is that I basically disconnect from the world, and it’s just me on my laptop.”
‘Cielo’
Courtesy of Luchadora Films
