Claudia Llosa, the Peruvian director of the Academy Award-nominated film, The Milk of Sorrow, has returned to the big screen, exploring pain, loss, healing and faith with her new film, Aloft.
Aloft, which stars Jennifer Connelly, Cillian Murphy and Melanie Laurent, is Llosa’s first English-language film and it follows the story of a single mother struggling to raise her children in a harsh arctic world. Cut off from society, Connelly’s character Nana works odd jobs to support her two sons, Ivan (Murphy) and Gully. When tragedy strikes, the family’s life is turned upside down and Nana abandons the world she knew in order to heal.
With Nana gone, Aloft explores faith in its most abstract forms, through Ivan. The film vacillates between the past and the present, following Ivan’s journey as an abandoned child, into an adult, a father, a husband and a man who spends more time with his falcons – his source of income – than he does his family. It’s only through his desire to reunite with his mother that we see him evolve and finally deal with the ghosts of his past.
“[It’s not just about] how to reconnect with life and trust life and have faith in life again,” Llosa tells Guideposts.org, “but how to have faith in order to continue building this life. What are the roots of believing in yourself, the roots of that kind of faith?”
In order to give the themes of faith and healing their due weight, Llosa says she needed actors who possessed, “a connection between those characters that I have on paper and those souls that I approach in real life.”
“What struck me about Cillian, he has this beauty that is so strange,” Llosa says. “He can be distant. He reminded me of [Ivan’s] falcon. He has these eyes that are so powerful and fragile at the same time.”
Of Connelly, whose magnificent performance as Nana is a highlight of the film, Llosa says, “As soon as I met her, I knew she has this ability of understanding the film in all its layers. She’s very smart but also physically, she has this ephemeral aura. She struck me as someone who can be perched to the earth and also far away from it, and I wanted that with Nana.”
While the casting of the film may have been the easy part, the director admits producing this film was one of the hardest things she’s ever done.
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Born in Peru and currently residing in Spain, Llosa shares the challenges of filming in a language that isn’t her native tongue. “In Spanish, my brain and my mouth, they go faster. They’re in sync. In English, sometimes the mouth feels sticky.”
Still, the director saw the importance in making a film that could appeal and apply to a mass audience. “This film is exploring the same things I was exploring in the last film; sorrow, pain, this idea of how can we heal, as a society, as a person. Are we able to do that? How can we relate to life again, how can we trust life despite our vulnerabilities? I wanted to explore all of this [universally], not coming from a specific background where you can hide from it, where someone could say ‘Well, that’s only happening [over] there.’“
That’s part of the reason the director chose to shoot in the remote, often desolate boundary between Canada and the U.S. Scenes of the snow-blown tundra and vast open landscape are almost as breath-taking as the dramatic fare itself. “The landscape, where I was going to shoot the film, was very important. Nature imposes itself, it’s grandiose. You can be caught by it, you can die in it. [It’s] reminding us where we come from, and how important that is.”
With a talented cast and a passion for telling a story in a way that simply hasn’t been done before, Llosa hopes her film can teach us something about the value of empathy and forgiveness.
“Forgiveness isn’t erasing. I think it’s more about the willingness to accept responsibility for what happened and accepting that there’s something bigger than you, that it’s not always your fault.”
Aloft is in theaters now.
