Fantasia 2025 Review: CIELO, A Heartwarming Magical Realist Take on Matricide

A young girl embarks upon a treacherous odyssey to deliver her mother an everlasting peace after a life of hardship in Alberto Sciamma’s magical realist drama, Cielo.

Santa (Fernanda Gutiérrez Aranda) is a young indigenous girl who lives with her struggling parents on the high-altitude plains of Bolivia. Their life is difficult, made moreso by the fact that her father, Julio (Juan Carlos Aduviri) takes every opportunity to abuse Santa’s long-suffering mother, Paz (Carla Arana). After catching a mysterious yellow fish and swallowing it whole, Santa discovers a large heart shape stone as she’s along with her father and promptly uses it to crush his skull, leaving him dead where he lay. Upon returning to her mother, rather than explain her deed, Santa calmly takes a kitchen knife and plunges it into her belly.

Self-orphaned, one would expect Santa to begin to spiral out of control, but instead she takes her beloved mother and carefully loads her into a large barrel. Taking great pains to preserve her body with scoops of salt from the nearby flats, Santa embarks on a journey across the above-mentioned plains with the intent to resurrect her and deliver her to the heaven she’s heard so much about.

So begins this winning but very strange adventure which will see Santa negotiating with a wayward priest, joining up with a band of traditional Cholita wrestlers, and running afoul of the law as she traverses beautifully barren landscapes on her way to heaven.

Director Sciamma first made his entry onto the international film seen with the deliberately camp horror film Killer Tongue almost thirty years ago. In the interim he’s slowly been evolving his craft and inching his way from b-grade – but very fun – schlock to the world of international arthouse. Cielo marks his big coming out party as the filmmaker premiered at this year’s edition of Fantasporto in Portugal, where it cleaned up at the festival’s award ceremony, before making its North American debut at Fantasia this week.

Far from the admirable silliness of Killer Tongue, Cielo is a gorgeously shot and staged fantastical drama centered around a spirited Gutiérrez Aranda, who delivers a knockout performance as the young Santa. Much credit is due to cinematographer Alex Metcalfe, who painterly framing of the Altiplano and Yungas regions of Bolivia breathtakingly capture the spirit of the film, connecting heaven (Cielo) and earth and helping Sciamma sell the idea that Santa’s goal may sound impossible, but to her it is very real.

All along the way, Santa encounters friends and foes, most of whom do not know the luggage she’s lugging around, just that a young girl needs help and they are going to deliver. The beauty of Gutiérrez Aranda performance exists in the matter-of-fact tone she takes with everyone, so much so that when one of the wrestlers asks what she’s carrying, she tells them the truth, but no one believes her. Until they do.

Interspersed with Santa’s odyssey are snapshots of Bolivian rural life. The Cholita wrestlers with who she’s traveling, put on shows to enthusiastic crowds in small town across the region. Metcalfe’s grand vistas showcase the diversity of not only the landscapes as Santa travels toward their eternal reward, but also the diversity of cultures with whom she interacts along the way.

Santa’s mystical ideas of where we go when we die are fueled by daily practices she enjoyed with her mother, the heavenly fish is a recurring theme, as are a series of movements designed to connect her and her mother with the great beyond. As she nears her goal, a run-in with the police who discovered her father’s body threatens to derail the mission, but Santa in undeterred, and what follows tips the film from charming pre-adolescent drama firmly in the genre realm.

Cielo’s magical realist take on hope, faith, and grief delivers a heartwarming story about apparent matricide by a young girl in such a way that the audience falls in love with Santa. The central performance from Gutiérrez Aranda is arresting, and while she isn’t exactly expected to capital A “act” a whole lot, her naturalistic delivery and mannerisms are crucial to solidifying the tone of the film so successfully. A beautiful film, handsomely crafted and expertly acted, Cielo stuns with its sincerity and optimism in a world too often marred by pain.