A filmmaker attempts to reunite Spanish Civil War veterans in Jesús Garay’s feature, which is billed as combining ‘reality and fiction in a moving essay on memory and guilt’. In trying to fit a documentary inside a drama, EYES ON THE SKY achieves mixed results.

First, the drama: Maria is making a documentary on the 1930s bombing of Barcelona by Franco’s Nationalists and their Fascist allies. She explains via voiceover that she is looking for a ‘story’, and becomes particularly interested in Manel, an air defence fighter, and Mario, one of the Italian bombers. Mario, now in his 90s, spent the rest of his life as a Dante expert, and is co-incidentally visiting Barcelona for a conference on the Inferno. There his path is set to cross with Maria’s.

One ex-gunner reports that Republican anti-aircraft technology was in effect only ‘propaganda’ for morale…

The plot develops slowly, as Maria struggles to track down and confront her key veterans – she is delayed by their advanced years and guilty prevarications. To compensate, the viewer is treated to various shots of the director as she strides around the modern town in a leather jacket, often staring out mysteriously at the graffiti-ed metropolis from above. More interestingly, we see her researching and making her piece. Here the film combines its ‘real’ and fictional elements, marrying genuine photographs, text and interviews (supposedly collected by the director) with faked historical footage of the central characters.

What is particularly frustrating about the initially laborious pacing is that it obscures compelling reminiscences by real Barcelona residents. We only see these interviews through the framing device of Maria piecing together her work, but they are the main draw of the first half of the film. The elderly population, filmed in significant locations around the city, describe sheltering in underground Metro stations from the Italian-led bombings. One ex-gunner reports that Republican anti-aircraft technology was in effect only ‘propaganda’ for morale – it barely worked against attacking planes, and so Barcelona’s citizens were at the mercy of their assailants. The town, explains a historian, was a testing ground in which German armies planned ‘terror’ of civilians as a tactic of war.

Collusion of old and new seems to have been a major objective…

When it comes to fruition, the modern day interaction between Mario and Maria has its rewards, as the elderly Italian bomber relates his detached experience high above the city, and begins to examine his own feelings of guilt after 70 years. It is slowly made clear that the film’s earlier delaying tactics were intended partly as an exploration of the effects of time itself on memory – the literature professor has lines like ‘it was another world’ and ‘it is best to forget’. While attempts to use loose ends to consider temporal disjointedness become more successful as the film goes on, they are sometimes more confusing than enlightening. This is particularly true of the unexplained role of the shadowy Manel.

Despite internal problems, the film is engaging, and rewards perseverance with disturbing climactic reconstructions of the ‘bombing of Barcelona’ of March 1938, in which there were over 1,000 deaths. Here, in an ambitious finale, Garay manages to combine the historical Catalan experience of the Civil War with his fragmented modern plot.

Collusion of old and new seems to have been a major objective, as it is seen throughout. The film’s music, which lays electric guitars over more traditional string arrangements, is one positive outcome of the pervasive interest. Its title, MIRANT AL CEL, or ‘eyes on the sky’, is both a literal reference to watching for bombs, and a nod to the idea of spiritual redemption, made clear by the prominence of Dante; it might also reflect on the aspirations of the feature itself, whose complex aims, though never boring, are not always successful.

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