A mosaic filled with everyday occurrences and intimacies, recorded on amateur film formats, an ode to love, loneliness and longings of the common people.
Sunlight plays through the leaves, shining on the water of the swimming pool and on the guests lazing or sauntering around an old spa resort in southern Chile. Inside, the staff receive lessons in folding serviettes and from afar someone approaches on a motorbike. In the background, a young couple practices kissing. It is just another hot summer day for the spa guests and the staff, ultimately unwinding into morsels of happiness and discovery. The film focuses on the mood, occasionally captured in extreme close-ups of eyes or drops of water on the skin. Love, desire and loneliness are themes in this film that walks a thin line between beauty and desperation. A heartrending look at the certainties and uncertainties of love, family and relationships formed in an old spa resort in the Chilean mountains.
“This is a narrative made up of multiple stories, but it is not a choral film. There is a centre and many branches that break off from the centre. It is a story that lives in the interior of the characters but also on the exterior of what surrounds them. For them, the world is open, both the forest and the sky shelter them. It is a story about solitude, but also about love; it is about the essence of feelings and the discovery of what we would like to be or to accomplish in our lives.” (José Luis Torres Leiva)
José Luis Torres Leiva
Born in 1975 in Chile. He studied audiovisual communications at UNIACC. He has made a considerable amount of (award-winning) short films and independent videos. The Sky, the Earth and the Rain, his first feature film, won the FIPRESCI Prize at the 2008 Rotterdam IFF.