Arthur Kleinjan
Netherlands | 2019 | 28 min
International Premiere
Language : English
Subtitle : French
How do you start an investigation into chance? By a late journey. The narrator tells how the eruption of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjalla stopped the plane he should have taken for Prague in 2010 from taking off. Meditating on the powerful images of the “Earth’s anger”, Kleinjan remembered another flight that never arrived: the aircraft crashed in northern Czechoslovakia in 1972, before reaching Belgrade. Only a Serbian stewardess miraculously survived the crash. She was included in the Guinness Book of Records and got to meet the Beatles, when John Lennon was considered like “Lenin” by the young Czech anti-communists. During this investigation that becomes a speculative mechanism, the filmmaker finds other lucky happenstances and troubling coincidences of this kind. Such as the old factory in ruins that opens and closes the film, Above Us Only Sky uses free association and incidental traces to blend characters and events into an original story, imbued with magical realism.
Emmanuel Chicon
