A Piece of Sky is the latest International Feature submission from Switzerland. And the film is about Anna and Marco. Two people who fall in love up high in the mountains of Switzerland. They have a young daughter named Julia and they just got married. Their life is about to start in the slow paced town way up in the sky.
Marco is working as a farmhand for a mountain farmer. He spends his time taking care of the cows. They remove rocks up high in the mountains to prevent landslides, and they cut the lawns to keep their town pristine clean. Anna takes care of a bar and inn. Everything is perfect. As Marco says, “What if this is all a dream?”
Unfortunately life doesn’t always work out the way we envision it. Marco begins to have debilitating headaches and blurred vision in one eye. After a terrible motorcycle accident, Marco is examined by a doctor and a huge tumour right above the right eye is discovered. It’s the part of the brain responsible for impulse control, and not only affects his personality, but eventually all movement in the left side of his body.
One truly horrifying incident will then forever change their lives.
Michael Koch has deliberately created a slow paced, absolutely breathtakingly beautiful film. Every frame is like moving photographs. Every shot lingers just a little longer than expected. We see the beauty in the simple things, like rocks, and the trees, and the snow. Life isn’t always all action but it can be slow, especially in a rural small village. Julia asks her mother: “What’s heaven like?” And I think heaven is taking our experiences with us up to the clouds in our hearts. And like the rocks that have been laying in the ground for centuries, a man can sometimes be tumbling down the mountain like a landslide, unable to control his future. Our loved ones will always be with us, in a piece of the sky looking down on us, like the small town where they live up in the clouds.