Description: The Sky Turns is a contemplation of time, memory, and mortality. After 35 years, Álvarez returns to her native village, Aldealseñor, in remote northwest Spain. She was the last child born there; now only 14 aged inhabitants remain. They represent the final generation of a people after more than 1,000 years of uninterrupted village life. Soon they will join the other ghosts that haunt these ancient hills – ghosts of dinosaurs, Romans, Moors, and Fascists. Though her film is intensely personal, Álvarez yields the spotlight to the dwindling but tenacious villagers. The passing years have made them natural philosophers, historians, and comedians – they muse on the transience of things, regard the folly of conquerors from Caesar to Bush, and lace it all with stoic, quintessentially Spanish humor. Álvarez’s proxy within the film is her friend Pello Azketa, a painter whose encroaching blindness mirrors the theme of dimming memory. Azketa’s nebulous landscapes offer a key to the region’s austere beauty, its stony heights dotted with lonely, wind-stunted trees that squat beneath a towering sky. From a small patch of ground, Álvarez opens up a vast domain, dissolving the personal into the universal, the fleeting into the timeless, and isolation into a connectedness that reaches high into the heavens and deep into the past. (Anthology Film Archives)