This old chap has just woken up in a wonderful Spanish documentary called El cielo gira by Mercedes Álvarez (spot the deliberate error in the headline in the link), which has just won a prize at the Rotterdam Film Festival. He is one of the 14 people who still lived in the village of Aldealseñor, near Soria, when the film was shot: the leisurely, poetic and multi-layered documentary traces a year in the life of the town, which will shortly cease to exist as a living population. The film emphasizes the isolation of the village from the modern world whilst stressing its deep connections with the larger cycles of time: it begins with an old lady pointing out dinosaur footprints, moves through the Roman invasion of the area - after which many locals famously committed suicide rather than submit to Roman rule - and ends with fighter planes flying overhead, destination Iraq. But the "overheard" conversations are the best part. "One day," one old guy muses, "they'll put men on the moon". (Incredible that anyone in the West is still saying that, but there it is.) But wisdom abounds, too: an early scene has two guys digging their own graves in the cemetery (they have a lot of time on their hands in Aldealseñor). "Up to the last minute," one of them reflects, "you think you’re going to live forever". It's terrific stuff: the best films being made in Spain these days are documentaries.
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