CUERPO CELESTE
Filmmaker Nayra Ilic Garcia brings Tribeca 2025 audiences CUERPO CELESTE, a film about the inevitability of change, for better or worse.
The film opens on New Year’s Eve on an isolated coastal beach with 15-year-old Celeste, her parents, family, and friends. A warm, lazy day of swimming, lounging, learning to drive, exploring the Atacama Desert landscape for fossils, songs by firelight, and stolen moments with a crush. It is a core childhood memory. The following morning, 1990 begins with a sudden tragedy, and Celeste’s path alters forever.
The story moves through time to almost a year later. An eclipse is coming. Celeste’s now estranged mother plans to sell the house, has given away her father’s life’s work, and thinks she can step back into parenting without the consequences of near abandonment. Celeste challenges the rules, discovering that her mother is not the only vastly different thing since she was last there.
Helen Mrugalski gives Celeste a lived-in maturity. To understand that she was only 14 during filming makes her performance all the more impressive. She is a star.
Cinematographer Sergio Armstrong‘s distinctive style is breathtaking. It is both a celebration of the desert topography and yet maintains stunning intimacy. Roberto Espinoza‘s sound design is revelatory. There is patience in Valerie Hernandez‘s editing. In a post-Pinochet nation, CUERPO CELESTE is a microcosm of the national Chilean political shift. It is a clever parallel. Nayra Ilic Garcia delivers an examination of time, grief, healing, secrets, and change. It is a moving coming-of-age story.
ABOUT THE FILM
Summer, 1990. As Chile’s dictatorship draws to a close, fifteen-year-old Celeste spends the holidays with her family on a remote beach by the Atacama Desert. When an event shatters her adolescence and sends her mother into a downward spiral, their world begins to shift.
Months later, drawn by the promise of a solar eclipse, Celeste returns to that same place, but nothing is the same. In a country on the brink of transformation, she must navigate her own path forward.
WRITTEN & DIRECTED BY Nayra Ilic García
STARRING Helen Mrugalski, Daniela Ramírez, Néstor Cantillana, Mariana Loyola. Nicolás Contreras, Clemente Rodríguez. Erto Pantoja
PRODUCED BY Fernando Bascuñán & Úrsula Budnik
CO-PRODUCED BY Luigi Chimienti, Alessandro Amato, Dominga Ortúzar, Florencia Rodríguez
CINEMATOGRAPHY BY Sergio Armstrong A.C.C.
EDITING BY Valentina Hernández
MUSIC BY David Tarantino
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