So Foul A Sky

Director Statement: Alvaro F. Pulpeiro

SO FOUL A SKY is a cinematographic meditation on the fragile and conflictive relationship between the citizen and a state that has ceased to provide meaning, future, and identity. Taking as a starting point certain sensibilities of Joseph Conrad’s magnum opus, Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard (1904), this film finds in contemporary Venezuela an illustration of a nation-state on the brink of political, economic, and foremost, symbolic collapse.

In this context of negligence, obscurity, and hostility from the father/state towards its child/citizen, is where the film is framed. A lyrical piece oscillating between distant lanscapes and intrusive intimacy. It is meant to be inhabited through all the senses as some sort of space rather than merely watched as a linear narrative following clear character lines. It explores the concept of the orphan deprived from its identity and national rights through a series of sporadic encounters with people who live, conscious or unconscious, rejecting all that binds them to take on sides from the active political conflict devastating Venezuela. Following the wake of those inhabitants of the frontier, who are either pirates or pilgrims, the film journeys through territories temporarily decolonized by a lineage – possibly invented by the film – who in their exile appear to have found a true home. A mobile home, anarchic, visceral, ultimately a neglected limbo, however, expansive and in many ways prosperous thanks to its rootlessness. I mention certain concepts not as maxims but as poetic liberties, constructions and stylisations rooted in characteristics that can be perceived as marginal, however, for the manner this film was created, they have acted as a vehicle in order to conceive a whole from a truly fragmented reality. Therefore, there are no characters with whom we can identify, nor domesticate. They are rather frugal encounters who in some ways reject being captured by narrative logics.

Summarising, SO FOUL A SKY ponders on questions whose starting point is the progenitor abandoning its child. An orphan that in order to survive must seek a new balance with life through a provider of symbolic meaning that ceases to be solid, imposing a paternalistic shadow over those ‘he’ mistreats calling them ‘his’ children. Children who burdened by the weigh of a race, history, a flag and anthem, now lay naked over landscapes also abandoned yet far from wasted. All who form part of this film, in very different degrees, are people emancipated by the force of an extreme situation where their national provider, Venezuela, has lost its mind in an internal battle. A decomposing war where some do not fit the characterisation of loyalist soldier from either side. Hence they are instantaneously ostracised and turned into pariahs if not traitors.

SO FOUL A SKY ventures into those hinterlands populated by stateless orphans, portraying this space-time in order to witness the silhouette drawn by those who resist – without baring a militant political discourse – all appropriation, including that of the camera. Henceforth, this is a film where our protagonists are conjured just like the wind is made visible through the blowing of a plastic bag.They become fleeting presences.