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THE SKY IS RED

EL CIELO ESTÁ ROJO

By Francina CARBONELL

STORYBOARD MEDIA - as PROD

Documentary - Post-Production 2020

The fire at the San Miguel prison left 81 dead prisoners. Only few registers of the incident were available to the press. This documentary has full access to the court record, and seeks to test their nature as evidence material. How and how far can we look at the remains of that obscure episode?

- Year of production
- 2020
- Genres
- Documentary, Drama, Social issues
- Countries
- CHILE
- Languages
- SPANISH-CHILEAN
- Duration
- 73 mn
- Director(s)
- Francina CARBONELL
- Producer(s)
- Gabriela SANDOVAL (STORYBOARD MEDIA), Carlos NÚÑEZ (STORYBOARD MEDIA), Francina CARBONELL
- Synopsis
- The fire at the San Miguel prison in Santiago de Chile in 2010, is one of the greatest prison tragedies in history. The fire started with a fight and ended in an uncontrolled fire in which the doors were not opened until more than an hour later. By then, calcined and silent, there were eighty-one bodies and thirteen wounded. After nine months of trial and three years of investigation, justice determined the acquittal of all the accused, remaining as a cause without responsibility and therefore open to repetition. The fire in the San Miguel prison spreads and makes visible the precarious conditions in which the prisoners live. As if emerging from an underground layer, images of a universe that is inaccessible to our gaze appear, in which the overcrowding, darkness and unstable lightness in which the inmates survive, suggests that every prison is a potential fire.
  
  The Sky is Red is displayed after obtaining the rights of the case’s court folder, files not previously authorized to the public. The testimonies, cell phone videos, security cameras, reconstitution of the scenes, expert photos, etc. They were used as reliable material of what happened and resolutives in the final sentence. But if we do the exercise of taking these images out from their evidence context, the material becomes compelling. The archives begin to reveal inadequacies: The security camera tries to zoom in until it reaches a diffuse image, the reconstitution seems manipulated, the prisoners declare in front of the gendarmes. We begin to notice these files with suspicion, revealing not only a case in which multiple negligence was committed, but also an institutional structure that seems impossible to dismantle.
  
  The Sky is Red is a documentary that bets for a plastic treatment of its materials. There is a plurality of formats, a multiple access to the same episode, a present constructed by moments that occurred in the past and in the future: a plural story that takes us to the desperation of a fire.