‘Cielo’ Director Alberto Sciamma & Star Fernanda Gutiérrez Aranda Talk About SXSW Film

Many of you may be familiar with the SXSW Festival, primarily based in Austin, Texas. Celebrated for its contribution to the arts and bringing the screen community together. The festival travels across the ocean making its debut in London this year. It also means many independent and international film titles are transferred over or given an opportunity to be showcased in London for the first time. This includes director’ Alberto Sciamma’s latest feature film set in Bolivia called Cielo, which is an adventure fantasy tale told through the lens of a child, posing the ultimate question: how far would you go to reach Heaven? We seek to find out in our interview with the creator of Cielo, Alberto Sciamma and its star Fernanda Gutiérrez Aranda.

The film focuses on an 8 year old girl called Santa (Fernanda Gutiérrez Aranda) from Bolivian Altiplano, she finds herself embarking on a an adventure of a lifetime as she attempts to bring joy to her mother, taking her from a life of misery into the land of paradise where happiness and love conquers all. Both mother and daughter decide to make a pact so when her mother passes, the girl would follow the stars and carry her body across the desert toward heaven, a place they believe is as physically real as any other. Through the journey Santa encounters a group of female wrestlers that help her on her way.

Also, on that path is, initially, her nemesis: A gruff policeman who arrests Santa but comes to suspect that she has magical powers. He soon sees that to achieve his own salvation, he must join Santa on her quest beyond the horizon. I sat down with director Alberto and child star of the film Fernanda Gutiérrez Aranda to discuss the joys of bringing their film to London, how important it was to tap into Bolivian roots, largely under-discussed within cinema and how child star Fernanda embraces her debut and a promising career as an actress. Read our full interview with director Alberto Sciamma and actress Fernanda Gutiérrez Aranda below.

[Editor’s Note: This interview includes translated content and has been edited for clarity.]

Zak: Firstly, congratulations on the film. Showcasing your film at the first South by Southwest London Festival must feel incredible. Could you share what it means to you to have your film here?

Alberto: For both of us, it’s incredible. because it’s a Spanish-speaking language shot in Bolivia, incredible landscape, but that’s very far away. So to be able to present it here, and in the first year of South by South West London, it’s an honor. I mean, we’re gonna be happy. We were screaming our heads off when we found out that we were able to present the movie and show it to the London audience.

Fernanda: It’s a beautiful experience because this is a Bolivian movie. I hope that the people here will have their hearts touched by the film.

Zak: Could you talk about the creative process behind making the film and how you came across Fernanda. As it is her acting debut, what was it about her audition or her impression that made you want to choose her for the role in the film?

Alberto: Well, for this movie we needed a very young girl in Bolivia, and we looked and looked until someone suggested a girl who was working in a music school, which was Fernanda. When we first met, I got a little bit frightened about Fernanda, simply because she was seven at the time. She’s ten now. She had her birthday here in London the other day—

Zak: Happy birthday!

Fernanda: Thank you!

Alberto: I was thinking, wow, seven is very young, but let’s have a Zoom. I was here at the time and we Zoomed Fernanda’s mother as well as Fernanda herself, and I started to speak to her. She had read the script already. It was like talking with a very mature person, even though she was seven. So I thought, wow, this girl has a lot of talent. And then we went to Bolivia and we tested her and we rehearsed and, you know. But obviously her performance, I mean, she’s in the film practically in every frame. So I knew it was pivotal that whoever was going to play that part was able to carry the whole thing through. And Fernanda did incredibly well.

Fernanda: The team was really embracing me, so I felt very comfortable. I found it very easy to adapt to the world of cinema for the first time, to my first shoot.

Alberto: Because the part is quite hard at some times in some of the scenes, I know she had some inner fight of how to play those moments. But she did super well.

Fernanda: In some scenes, I had problems separating Santa, the character, from myself. I felt I wasn’t getting what was required of me. So I became frustrated with myself because I wanted to do the best possible.

Alberto: [To Fernanda] You managed to get out of that.

Alberto: We had some scenes where there’s a moment in the movie, for example, where Fernanda has to encounter the bully of her mom. It took her a while to get into the scene. Obviously, I offered to amend it, to change it, to play it differently. But she said, “No, no, just wait a moment. I will get there.” It took her like two hours. But… she managed to do it. And I remember telling her, but “What do you think is the problem?” And she was saying, I know it’s all make-believe, but I’m thinking about my own mom. So it was that reality that she was bringing to the part. It’s interesting working with Fernanda. I’ve worked with kids before, but never in the entire movie. And the incredible thing is how actors need to find a way to bring out feelings from themselves. Well, Fernanda wasn’t really acting. She was just responding to the situation. So every tear you see in the movie are real tears, everything was her.

Zak: [To Fernanda] As this is your acting debut, what was it like for you to find out that there’s this role that you could play and when you were offered to read the script? What was it like to read the script for the first time?

Fernanda: When I learned that I could maybe take the part, when I learned that I had the opportunity to be in Cielo, I was very happy but also concerned because I understood that it would require a huge amount of effort on my part. But because my mom and dad supported her, I did it. And when I read the script, I felt it was very tender, but at the same time, I also understood the dark parts of the script.

Alberto: And I was able to talk to her like talking with another. We didn’t hide anything. We sat down and just chatted about the meaning of this and the other, and how to play it.

Fernanda: I was was okay with the script. So I said yes!

Zak: So my question for you Alberto is: As a director with a film that is has that adventurous fantasy kind of feeling, could you perhaps share your how you brought cultural influences into your film and why you wanted to explore these concepts of revival, life, and death through the eyes of a child?

Alberto: Yeah, I mean, the movie was right to be done in Bolivia because Bolivia offered an unseen world. I knew that what Bolivia was offering, I could create a new universe, which is what the movie shows. It’s not an anthropological movie about Bolivia. It’s Bolivia and its people, and all the team that was 99% Bolivian, contributed to the movie. And it’s not so much that the movie looks at the world through the eyes of Santa, the character played by Fernanda, but the entire movie is in a way a sort of dream or fairy tale. And Bolivia, because it has that unknown magic, was allowing me to make it work better. And once I went there and I realised the talent that they have, you see what happens normally is that in certain countries that have everything, it’s a different thing than countries that don’t have that much in filmmaking terms. But what they do have, so they may have only one facility house in the entire country where you can hire some lines, but they have a huge talent for creating whatever out of nothing. And that’s the way that I really like to work anyway. So that offered a flexibility of how to make everything work. I don’t think this movie could have happened anywhere else but Bolivia.

Zak: And to end off the interview, my last question will be, what do you hope for the audience to take from this film, especially from the perspective of a Bolivian?

Alberto: I hope that they understand that… Out of the harsh beginning of the movie, which is the dirt, a beautiful flower of hope shines through and rises to the skies. This is what I hope. I hope that they feel strangely spiritually uplifted. That would be my dream. How each individual is going to feel you never know, but I hope that they I hope they don’t forget the movie, like it or dislike it, I hope it remains in their heads, or in their souls, or in their hearts. This is not a movie that can be intellectualized in a way. It’s a movie that you have to feel, so you have to let go like riding a rollercoaster and see where it takes you, not having any idea where that is going to be. I hope that the final conclusion has some spiritual value to it.

Zak: Could you share your favorite thing about each other?

Alberto: My favorite thing about Fernanda is that not only is she clever, but she’s a child. And what I mean by that is that she has both qualities. She can be very serious and professional, but she can be very childlike. And it’s the tenderness that she has with everyone. Bolivians are very tender in general, they’re very inwards, but Fernanda can really embrace you. So I love that in a kid. As I said, I’ve got two girls and they are very different. They’ve grown up now. And Fernanda was like— well, she’s part of the family now. Her and her mom, and her dad, and the entire team.

Fernanda: I like that Alberto is creative, and the completeness that he was able to bring into the film.

Zak: That’s all from me. Thanks so much for your time and congratulations on the film. I really hope it finds its release well and I look forward to seeing it release in London again.

Cielo premiered at SXSW London on June 6th, 2025.

Thank you for reading our Cielo Alberto Sciamma and Fernanda Gutiérrez Aranda.