Álvaro F. Pulpeiro
2021Un cielo tan turbio
Álvaro F. Pulpeiro
If there was an award for the most stylish opening scene, it would go to Álvaro Pulpeiro for ‘So Foul a Sky’. A road movie and a immersive report from a Venezuela on the verge of collapse. Inspired by Joseph Conrad’s classic novel ‘Nostromo’, we are led into a twilight world where allegiances change among the travellers under the enormous dome of the sky. Pirates and pilgrims cross tracks, and oil is traded on the black market in the middle of nowhere. Crackling car radios relay an ideological battle of words. Has the oil cast a curse on Venezuela? The country is in the midst of the worst political and humanitarian crisis that South America has experienced in the 21st century. Instead of trying to explain the chaotic situation, Pulpeiro places us in the middle of it. A sensory and cinematic film, where the oil runs like thick, black blood through the arteries of the road network and connects us with some of the people who are trying to make life work beyond law and order.
So Foul a Sky
Un cielo tan turbio
Álvaro F. Pulpeiro
Under shadows cast by colossal oil refineries, emerging from the desert like chrome cathedrals, SO FOUL A SKY presents a journey through several frontier lands of Venezuela - the world's first petrostate - now shaken by the worst political and humanitarian crisis South America has experienced in the 21st century. While storm clouds gather in the skies, sleepy soldiers patrol the Caribbean Seas, migrants drift through lugubrious border posts between Brazil and Venezuela, and smugglers venture across the hostile Guajira Desert, trafficking the last remaining barrels of embargoed gasoline. All is enveloped by scrambled radio newsreels fired from both sides of the ideological struggle ripping the capital apart. This is a film portraying pirates and pilgrims, orphaned children of a land that they have made their own without planting flags or imposing anthems; anarchic just like the hovering storm clouds threatening to put an end to the limbo all inhabit.
Un cielo tan turbio