If there was an award for the most stylish opening scene, it would go to Álvaro Pulpeiro for ‘So Foul a Sky’. A roa | dG1fRWd5TWtvZTdIeVU
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00:00Venezuela, a country rich in oil, is now in ruins due to a sharp political and humanitarian crisis.
00:06Inhabited by transit characters, orphans of a state that in a way has abandoned them.
00:11What happens when what you thought belonged to the homeland, to the symbols, to history,
00:18suddenly decomposes completely, leaving you absolutely devastated?
00:23That is, like an orphan, what happens at that moment and where do you go, especially inside yourself?
00:27With the novel Nostromo by Joseph Conrad under his arm,
00:30in its second part, the Galician Álvaro Fernández Pulpeiro
00:33turns Venezuela into his particular Costa Guana,
00:36a name with which the writer baptized a fictitious republic of South America
00:40and offers us a sensory and immersive experience,
00:43along with ghostly characters and characters from the film.
00:47Venezuela is a rhetorical figure for me.
00:49That is, Venezuela is like Paraconra of the Costa Guana,
00:52which is a fragmentation of a lot of feelings, landscapes, geopolitical situations,
00:58where you start to organize them, but beyond the documentary reality.
01:03Here the images were discovered, just as a diamond is discovered, under pressure,
01:07under pure pressure, we discovered it.
01:09So, in that sense, Venezuela is a metaphor,
01:12sometimes you don't make the film you want, you make the film you can.
01:16And that seems very beautiful to me.
01:18Making the film you can, because it also gives you a touch of humility
01:21that cinema is not subjugating a landscape or a society or a reality
01:25based on resources and financing,
01:28but based on ingenuity,
01:31based on identifying yourself a little bit with everything you are.
01:35I would like to ask you,
01:38to identify yourself a little bit with everything you are.
01:41Un cielo tan turbio is a journey to the bowels of desolation,
01:45a fascinating film in the background and in the form,
01:48in which an overwhelming cacophonic colas
01:50and the heartbreaking beauty of shadows and darkness
01:53imprison us without feeling the need to escape.
01:57Because such a cloudy sky is as subjugating
01:59as the way of living and understanding the cinema of its director,
02:03Álvaro Fernández Pulpeiro.
02:05One of the great visual inspirations of the film is
02:08Soy Cuba, by Karatozo,
02:10which is photographed by Sergei Urusevsky,
02:13who was a war photographer, a war cinematographer, really.
02:19The sound is really an absolutely invented sound.
02:21Imagine, 400 layers of sounds
02:24during an hour and a half of film.
02:26Una patria que es tan grande, aunque quieran ser malos.
02:32And in terms of the image, or the darkness,
02:35or the gloomy identity of this image,
02:37it basically comes from the idea of suspending the passage of time.
02:41And in this way we build what is a limbo.
02:44The limbo in which all these characters live, all these people, really.
02:47We didn't want to drink, for example,
02:49neither from the Verité cinema nor from the ethnographic sensory cinema.
02:53We wanted to invent, let's say, a new poetic of the image
02:56in which we negotiate in a visceral and total way with reality,
03:01but at the same time we didn't only exist in relation to it.
03:05We didn't just observe it, we weren't passive entities.
03:09From there comes, obviously, a type of photography
03:11that is both intrusive and at the same time completely distant from reality.
03:16It's curious, what is to observe?
03:19That is, who observes who?
03:21Because we always think that cinema is us looking at.
03:24But I felt, and we really felt in many moments,
03:27that the most important thing is how they looked at us,
03:29from the inside out and from the outside in.
03:31So we are trying to invert a little the relation of the gaze.