AllMovie

With The Sky Turns (El Cielo Gira), documentarist Mercedes Alvarez takes a deeply personal and intimate journey to the city of her birth -- a hamlet located in Northern Spain. Once there, she chooses to focus, cinematographically, on the platonic concept and nature of a "place" as illustrated by that village. Alvarez shoots the film in a style that recalls the most brilliant impressionistic painters (Monet, Renoir, Degas), and that explores the way the play of light on surfaces paints one's image of a locale as that light shifts over the bittersweet passage of time. The documentary investigation transpires at a crux for the small community: on the cusp of utter collapse, it finds redemption and restoration at the very last minute from a new wave of immigrants.