ersonal documentaries get off too easy, methinks. When treacly or unrestrained, their makers can use the ol’ intimate observer-subject relationship as an implicit get-out-of-scrutiny-free card, ducking both the ethical ardor we expect from good journalism and emotional variance we seek in narrative storytelling via the therapeutic exorcising of unwanted demons. My taut thoughts on the subject: looking to work out some unresolved issues? Great. Just don’t shoot it, guilelessly and with all the ideological docility of a rock, and then expect me to haul ass to the Walter Reade for your premiere screening in this year’s New Directors/Regurgitated Bile series or somesuch.

So it was with some trepidation that I approached The Sky Turns, Spanish director Mercedes Alvarez’s exploration of her superannuated birthplace, La Aldea, which—get this—hasn’t seen a single birth since the filmmaker’s. Which would make her One Very Special Lady, but her method is supremely self-effacing, humbly observing as subjects discuss ambiguous information, and steadily contextualizing what she films and how she films it within a tight ideational framework. It’s a film not interested in closing up any wounds, but rather in exploring how, as a historian of a land nearly divested of concrete historical records, Alvarez is presented with one dichotomy—remembered images and recorded images—that precipitates several others—painting and cinema, change and stagnancy, life and death. As polarities merge, things get progressively sublime, even as Alvarez traffics in the drabbest mundanity, very nearly content to watch the sky turn, if not paint dry.

Some may find her aesthetic dishonest, and not least because lush imagery takes the foreground and the dire state of the villa’s political influence or cultural influx—i.e., zilch—is relatively de-emphasized. Rather, the dialogues, predominantly petty ping-pong debates between cuddly geriatric villagers willing their own memories over those of others, come off so deliberately they couldn’t be mistaken for candid, and not due to a rickety tone or a hammy message. Alvarez covers each debater in a static medium-shot, as if any slight movement were out of the question, and alternates between them in unerring ostinato clip-clop. But this is a formal device with a cogent purpose, and its implicit admission to lack of objectivity only increases its validity as such. Speaker and listener are cut apart by particular framing, but the point is quite sunnier than that Harold Pinter maxim that people pretend (or consciously adapt to the idea) that other people don’t exist. Instead, the separation deems that each speaker lives in his own realm of experience, expounding his own recollections, and the sum of these shots forms the gestalt of collective memory, or as optimistic types might imagine, fact.

There are others integrating artifice and documentation on Alvarez’s level—Amir Muhammad comes to mind—but the director has more precedents working in fiction than non-. Some have invoked Andrei Tarkovsky, per her eye for perversely burnished compositions hemmed from the dilapidated, and a decidedly slow grind towards transcendence; I felt a hefty dose of Hou Hsiao-hsien, not just in the obvious thematic lynchpin of cinema as a means to reconstruct the past of one’s homeland, but in devices buttressing said lynchpin, such as characters glimpsed through doorways creating frames-within-frames, and a concentration of crucial information concealed just offscreen. Either way, we’re a world apart from Raymond Depardon, a dude who prefaced his last film with the disclaimer, “I chose which footage to keep and which to excise.” I’m paraphrasing, but yeah, it’s wacko. And, um, ethical, I guess.

Meanwhile, Alvarez proffers more ostensibly seamless tropes, suddenly made salient in the doc format. The landscape works of a painter going blind—talk about potent metaphor for the disintegration of memory—morph into their antecedents, an impressionistically foggy hillside becoming a plainly clear one but first ensconced in the ghostly white haze of digital manipulation. Perhaps if Alvarez had shot on film, The Sky Turns would look a bit more graceful, lucid, beautiful. But DV lends it a haunting portent, a look that blends denizens in with their surroundings in the nighttime darkness, visually impressing the transience of both man and nature. Indeed, Alvarez’s one compositional constant, a painterly gesture, draws an x-axis between sky and city, and implicitly, eternity and death. These are villagers who ponder the imperialist potential of the U.S. government and the colonization of Mars with the same goofy credulity, and while initially they seem glimpsed from an inordinately wry distance, the hermetic nature of the film finally seals us in with them.