Press Kit - New Yorker Films

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New Yorker Films
220 East 23rd St., Ste. 409
New York, NY 10010
Tel: (212) 645-4600
Fax: (212) 683-6805
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THE SKY TURNS
CREDITS
Directed by
Written by
MERCEDES ÁLVAREZ
MERCEDES ÁLVAREZ
ARTURO REDÍN
Producer
JOSÉ MARÍA LARA
Dir. of Photography ALBERTO RODRÍGUEZ
Editor
SOL LÓPEZ
GUADALUPE PÉREZ
Assistant Dir.
ABEL GARCÍA
Sound
AMANDA VILLAVIEJA
AURELIO MARTÍNEZ
Sound Recordist
INMACULADA SERRA
1st Asst. Camera
RAÚL CUEVAS
Prod. Management MIKEL HUÉRCANOS
EVA SERRATS
FEATURING
PELLO AZKETA (The painter)
And the habitants of ALDEALSEÑOR:
ANTONINO MARTÍNEZ, SILVANO GARCÍA, JOSÉ FERNÁNDEZ, CIRILO FERNÁNDEZ,
JOSEFA GARCÍA, ÁUREA MINGO, MILAGROS MONJE, ELÍAS ÁLVAREZ, CRISPINA LAMATA,
VALENTINA GARCÍA, BLANCA MARTÍNEZ, ROMÁN GARCÍA, SALAH RAFIA, HICHAM CHATE,
ALFREDO JIMENO, SALVADOR ROMO, JUAN IGLESIAS, NEMESIO MONJE, SARA GARCÍA
www.NewYorkerFilms.com
Spain, 2005
In Spanish with English subtitles
110 min., Color
1.66, Dolby SR
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SYNOPSIS
Winner of the top award at numerous film festivals, including Rotterdam and Buenos Aires,
The Sky Turns is a sublime contemplation of time, memory, and mortality that evokes Víctor
Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive, El Sur and The Dream of Light.
After a 35-year absence, director Mercedes Álvarez returns to her native village Aldealseñor in
remote northwest Spain. She was the last child born there; now only 14 aged inhabitants
remain. Though her film is intensely personal, Álvarez yields the spotlight to the dwindling but
tenacious villagers. The passing years have made them natural philosophers, historians, and
comedians -they muse on the transience of things, regard the folly of conquerors from Caesar to
Bush, and lace it all with ironic, quintessentially Spanish humor.
For the moment, life goes on. Very soon however, without any outward commotion and without
anyone to bear witness, it will all come to an end. The final 14 represent the last generation of a
people that have carried on more than 1000 years of uninterrupted village life. Soon they will join
the other ghosts that haunt these ancient hills - ghosts of dinosaurs, Romans, Moors, and
Fascists.
Álvarez’s proxy within the film is her friend, the painter Pello Azketa. The 14 neighbors from this
village and Azketa share something in common: things have begun to disappear before their
eyes. Azketa’s encroaching blindness mirrors the film’s theme of dimming memory and his
nebulous landscapes offer a key to the region’s austere beauty, its stony heights dotted with
lonely, wind-stunted trees that squat beneath a towering sky. From a small patch of ground,
Álvarez opens up a vast domain, dissolving the personal into the universal, the fleeting into the
timeless, and isolation into a connectedness that reaches high into the heavens and deep into the
past.
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Director’s Note
I was three years old when my family bade a final farewell to Aldealseñor, at the end of the
sixties. Although my older brothers and sisters and myself were born there –as were my
parents and the parents of my parents – and even though I can now relate the lifestyle of those
ancestors of the village whom I never came to know, that fateful day at the end of the sixties, in
one sense so near, fails to come to mind; it is as if it does not belong to my memory.
I have read in the books how this village had some four hundred inhabitants at the turn of the
twentieth century. Later, three hundred, later two hundred and fifty… Nowadays, the district
contains five abandoned villages, or about to be abandoned ones. And indeed, all over the
province of Soria, the rate of depopulation is accelerating, leaving behind abandoned countryside
as well as eradicating centuries of memory in a relentless inexorable relinquishment.
Appearance and Disappearance
There existed the possibility of witnessing – in a concrete time and place, with real people – a
basic chapter of human experience and human life: the period of ruin and decay that comes
before the definitive disappearance. The possibility of being able to show what things occur then,
and record them as they happen.
Cinema fiction has often successfully captured the decadence of a human being: sometimes with
greater difficulty it has captured the decadence of a human group, that of a clan, of a generation.
For greater events, to deal with the fall of a whole civilization or culture, the most usual thing was
to work by allusions, which the language of cinema turns into ellipsis. A countryside is shown in
ruins, how it was before, and what it no longer is. But in our case, what is being dealt with is
that interval where there is still some life left. And during this period of disappearance there still
remain some unique moments, which have a special significance even as they fade away and
which have the capacity to evoke the intensity of the episode. These significant episodes are
perhaps common in the fall of individuals, groups, cultures. I wanted to pay special attention to
those moments, without separating them from the overall picture and without underlining their
dramatic force.
There exists a certain kind of landscape, not easy to come across, but which does exist in the
region of the village, around the barren uplands of Soria. A landscape that provides an
immediate impact, a physical experience, with just one view of the landscape. That presence of
distinctive historical periods, even prehistoric ones. The tracks of dinosaurs in contrast to the
village as it now is, as it is about to disappear. The Celtic-Iberian remnants, the Roman ruins or
the Arab tower of the palace, all live side by side within this community.
That deep sense of time that orders the seasons, the generations, the millennia, was
miraculously to be felt in that area, still intact and alive to the sense. And I had the premonition
that this final chapter in the history of the village, the days we spent there during shooting, was
nothing more than just another of the intervals, before a new period would come in, that of the
hotel and the new electricity windmills.
I wondered to myself if this shared experience of biographical time (my own and that of the
present inhabitants) and that of a collective memory could be projected on a vaster, deeper time
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span. It was worth attempting. The way we attempted to do this was to mark a compass over
these three elements of time, which reappear at various times throughout the film. Thus, the
shooting time becomes the documentary time, and eventually the narrative time. The Sky Turns
relates the selected events and significant moments within a part of the disappearing process;
more precisely, between autumn, 2002 and June 2003, and so becomes anchored in time and
in memory.
– Mercedes Álvarez
Biographies / Filmographies
Director MERCEDES ÁLVAREZ
Mercedes Álvarez directed the short film, The African Wind (El viento africano) in 1997. In 1998,
in pursuit of the language of documentary, she enrolled in Pompeu Fabra University to take a
master’s in Documentary and Creation. She worked as scenic director on the feature film, Under
Construction (En construcción) which was directed by José Luis Guerin, and which received a
Goya award in 2001 for best documentary as well as the International award at the San
Sebastian Film Festival, among other awards. As was the case with Under Construction, the
project The Sky Turns (El Cielo Gira) originated from the above-mentioned UPF master’s course,
with the help of its director, Jordi Balló. It has counted on the help of some of the participants
from the course and financial assistance from the ICCA, The Government of Navarre, The Basque
Government and the regional Government of Castilla y León, and with the participation of Canal+
Spain.
The painter PELLO AZKETA
The artistic itinerary of Pello Azketa, born in 1949, would perhaps merit, on its own, the
consideration of an account, an ill-fated account, which would have the value of a parable. His
pictorial search is a special case of dedication and tenacity. The result of this dedication is the
achievement of a very personal technique, which only serves for him, and which obliges us to
rethink, what it means to look and to see, what is subject and object, something basic to any
concept of painting.
During the seventies, Pello Azketa belonged to a group of painters, a prolific generation of young
vanguard painters which got the name of the “Pamplona School”, and who developed their
outlook in distinct directions from the abstract expressionism of Mariano Royo to the minimalist
poetic simplification of Pedro Salaberri. Azketa, however, already followed a hyper-realistic line of
exploration applied to an urban landscape and to the ordinary objects of daily life.
At the beginning of that decade, the painter began to first suffer the eye disease that would leave
him within a few years of being almost totally blind.
In 1992, alter several years of medical consultations, the painter once more put himself in front
of a clean canvas. He still retained some slight vision and an enormous, almost intact, visual and
pictorial memory. Since 1993, which marks the definitive return of a second period for the
painter, Azketa has never left off preparing new exhibitions, every one or two years. Normally
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these are monographic collections of his that are the result of some trip or other, and gathered
from photographic material and the notes he has made in situ during his travels.
Producer JOSÉ MARÍA LARA
José María Lara has produced more than thirty shorts and thirteen features since 1988. Many
of his productions have screened in film festivals around the world, garnering numerous awards
and critical acclaim.
2005
2004
2003
2003
2002
2000
1999
1998
1998
1997
1996
1994
1993
1991
The Sky Turns
25 Grados En Invierno
El Coche de Pedales
El Aprendiz de Diablo
Francisca
Time’s Up!
Asfalto
Pecata Minuta
Atilano
A Ciegas
La Fabulosa Historia de Diego Marin
Justino
Los Anos Oscuros
El Anonimo
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