The Sky is Red

Introduction from The Bones‘s producer Lucas Engel.

Francina Carbonell’s powerful debut feature uses images from security cameras, archival audio, and extant documents, all part of a court filing, to narrate the story of the 2010 fire at San Miguel prison in Santiago, Chile, where 81 people died. “I feel that the officers working then executed our sons, they condemned them to death,” says a voice in one of the recordings. “A group of people who didn’t open the gates at the right time, who didn’t have their protocols in check, who didn’t even know who was on the tower.” Through the smoke, The Sky Is Red extrapolates images, mixes temporalities, and renders the invisible visible: the daily lives of those who already lost the right to everything.

Preceded by:

The Bones / Los huesos
Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña, 2021, Chile, 14m
Spanish with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Winner of the Best Short Award at the Venice Film Festival, this animated stop-motion film narrates the unearthing of corpses for an expiatory ritual that seeks to free Chile from its authoritarian and oligarchic past.