Spanish director Alberto Sciamma brings his allegorical film, ‘Cielo,’ to Haifa 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.

“Seven or eight years ago, I was in Berlin with a friend of mine, who became one of the producers of the movie. He is married to Ana María Vera, a very well-known Bolivian classical pianist.

“They asked me what I wanted to do next, and I said, ‘I don’t know, but I have an image in my head.’ It was just an image of a little girl lost in the Altiplano, swallowing a fish.

“Ana María said, ‘Have you thought about Bolivia?’ I hadn’t. Then I went there and discovered it, and I started writing the script, thinking about Bolivia,” he explained.

While the landscapes are spectacular, the film also shows how harsh life can be there.

“When you are in El Alto and the Altiplano, you are 4,000 meters above sea level. It is really cold at night. When you first arrive, you think, Where is the oxygen? It’s gone.

“It is beautiful and majestic, with incredible light and colors, but it is also a very hard life.”

Among the locations Sciamma and his crew discovered was a church covered in vivid murals depicting scenes from Christian biblical stories.

“It is considered something like the Sistine Chapel of the Altiplano,” he said.

He soon discovered that working in Bolivia was very different from the kind of filmmaking he was used to.

“In Europe or the United States, if you need a location, a location manager shows you photographs and negotiates a price.

“In Bolivia, you may have to speak with the Aymara community, which meets in an assembly and decides collectively whether you can film on its land. If they agree, there may be a Pachamama ceremony, and you don’t necessarily pay in money.

“For one location, the production gave the community bricks because they needed them for an extension. At the church, our payment was replacing all the light bulbs that had been broken for years.”

Sciamma was especially taken with the Cholita wrestlers, a troupe of exuberant, traditionally dressed women fighters, who appear in the film.

Describing them as “an explosion of life,” he recalled that they constantly joked, sang, and laughed during the shoot. “They were so much fun, so colorful, so strong-minded,” he said, adding that their presence gave the movie a jolt of feminine power it needed.

Fernanda Gutiérrez Aranda, as Santa, gives an extraordinary performance.

“The first time she looks at the fish, I told Fernanda, ‘Look at it as if you had never seen a fish.’ I didn’t want judgment in her expression. I just wanted her to look....

“The movie begins in quite a violent way, but it isn’t filmed as a horror movie. It is very matter-of-fact. We needed that matter-of-factness to make her strong, almost supernatural. She has a fixation, and she needs to fulfill it.

“The whole movie has a kind of fairy-tale quality, and that could only be achieved by having the little girl alone. As soon as you introduce a mature person who reacts according to logic rather than the dreams of a child, you lose that.

“It wasn’t easy to find a child actress who could bring the child heroine to life,” he said. “We had been casting children, but by the time we were ready to shoot, the girls we had first considered had grown too old.

“Ana María Vera runs a music program for children in La Paz and said, ‘There is a little girl here you should meet because she is very clever.’

“Fernanda was seven. I realized immediately that she was extraordinarily intelligent. She was already two years ahead in school and had read all the Harry Potter books....

“Working with her was like working with an adult. She would ask me things such as, ‘Why is Santa biting the policeman? I thought Santa was good. Why is she doing that?’ And we would discuss it.”

Told that the film seems designed to be experienced more than explained, Sciamma agreed.

Asked how he decided to take part in a film festival in Haifa at a time when so many artists are calling for a cultural boycott of Israel, he said that when he told people he would be coming to the festival, “Some people were saying, ‘Absolutely, you should go,’ and some people were saying, ‘Are you crazy?’”

Sciamma, who left Spain at the age of 18 decades ago, was undeterred.