Mercedes Alvarez's debut feature, The Sky Turns, is a reflective meditation on impermanence, memory and the passage of time.

Just 14 inhabitants remain in Aldealsenor, a village in the dramatic barren uplands of Spain's Soria (Castilla). They are the last of a people that has lived a largely uninterrupted village life for more than a thousand years. For the moment life goes on, but with no-one to bear witness and with no dire death throes it will soon cease to exist.

The villagers and painter Pello Azketa have something in common: things are disappearing before their eyes, and soon their worlds will not exist as they know them. Alvarez returns to her native village to capture the dissipating life ways of Aldealsenor and the fading field of vision of Azketa. This Rotterdam Tiger Award-winner chronicles the effects of time on a single village with a certain sadness, but it also embraces the connectedness of time and place, and the continuum of intervals that comprise historical time.