Fantasia Festival 2025: ‘Cielo’ unlocks magic and wonder

Filmmaker Alberto Sciamma applies The Hero’s Journey to his own magical tale about female resilience and strength. Playing this year’s Fantasia Festival, Cielo, which means heaven, finds a young girl named Santa (Fernanda Gutiérrez Aranda) seeking a higher state of existece to lift her family out of poverty and abuse. With great uses of color and sweeping Bolivian landscapes, Sciamma unravels a story that pierces to the core of humanity, despite it’s larger-than-life exterior. Beneath the layers, human beings are trying their best to reach for better things and rise above life’s thick muck.

Santa carries a map of the stars with her. With the best of intentions, she sets in motion a dark, yet hopeful, trajectory that is not without its claw marks. She seeks the pattern of the Pisces in the sky, believing it to be the heavens, and that’s where she’s headed. Possessing a magical touch, she leaves both destruction and encouraging brightness in her wake. But that’s the way of things – both strands frequently tangle over our lives, and we’re never fully prepared. Santa is a conduit through which we engage with existence in a fresh, promising new way. The light in her eyes never wavers, even as things go awry midway through her sojourn.

Along her way, she meets a cast of characters – a wrestler, La Reina (Mariela Salaverry), a priest (Luis Bredow), and a cop (Fernando Arze Echalar). They each serve a purpose in pushing Santa further into experiencing her transformation, which can only occur when she opens herself to all facets of life, from the unshakeable darkness to the blinding light. Only in accepting both can she unlock the next stage of her life.

Sciamma offers up a heightened reality, coated in the fantastical, that speaks to the human journey. We’re all on a mission to reach for higher, greater things, and sometimes we do happen to make it. Other times, we might fail, yet we keep pushing onward by mustering all the strength we possibly can. With the visuals underscoring the explicit dialogues in the script, there are multiple layers always ready to be discovered and discussed. That’s the mark of an artist fully in grasp of his capabilities. Aranda’s performance is surprisingly rich with a deep study of human emotion that beguiles her age. It’s as though she’d been doing this for decades, making the film even more potent in its themes.

Cielo might be magical to the touch, but its core is very much rooted in reality. It harnesses the power of childlike curiosity to reignite our long-dormant collective inquisitiveness. There’s something that’s truly lost when we grow older; we’ve somehow traded innocence for a bland, meandering existence. But the film unlocks an inner wonder that’s just waiting to break free. If you let it, it might teach you a thing or two about living.