A heady brew of science and poetry, Alison McAlpine’s experimental feature “Cielo” tries to film an essentially unfilmable subject: the night sky above the Atacama Desert in Chile. The absence of visual pollution makes the location an unusually pure spot to see the heavens — a treasured site for astronomers and stargazers hunting for undiscovered exoplanets, and a place rich in folklore, rock art and mysticism.
In a sense, the movie acknowledges its own limitations. One observatory scientist compares humans looking through telescopes to ants unable to comprehend the immensity of their surroundings. Moviegoers may feel the same way. Time lapse compositions of moving stars and clouds pass too quickly to permit reverie. No drone camera that slowly reveals the expanse of a textured landscape could ever quite capture the grandeur of being there.
And while “Cielo,” hardly unique among experimental films in taking the sky as a subject, describes the feeling of looking upward at a boundless firmament, watching it can’t help but call attention to the artifice of moviemaking. The sides of the frame are all too visible. Moody woodwinds fill the emptiness of the space.
Ms. McAlpine’s purple musings in voice-over (“the stars tell me to go on a journey in this desert”), and the decision not to identify subjects formally until the closing credits, give the film an unnecessary fuzziness. Still, the interviews yield scattered moments of poignancy, from a desert resident who believes his dead daughter is watching him from a star to a scientist who ruminates on celestial bodies’ distance and the hundreds or thousands of years that pass before what happens to them is visible on Earth. For “Cielo,” that sense of the infinite is out of reach.
Not rated. In Spanish, English and French, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 18 minutes.
