On a bus from the South of Chile, Ignacio (40), a professional thief, meets the pretty foreign Malena, who has an artificial leg. He tells her about his adventures in recent months. How he took part in a failed robbery in which one of his sidekicks held his finger a little too tightly on the trigger of his revolver. How he fled and ended up in the arms of a strange maniac in a remote area who imprisoned him and tortured him apparently without reason. How he eventually escaped and recovered with an Indian peasant woman. And he tells her about his elder brother Dámaso, also a member of the gang, like all his other relatives. Dámaso has ended up in jail partly through Ignacio’s fault. And then there are his slightly weird sister Julieta and his young nephew Tak, who is trying to keep out of crime.Cielo ciego is the story of poor ageing crooks who really lead a fairly normal bourgeois life, until a wrong decision lands them in a violent hell. The alternation between the peaceful homey life and the criminal activities in which everyone can suddenly lose control, determines the rhythm of Acuña’s feature début. It is occasionally fast, hard and referring to America crime films, and then it is a calm and compassionate sketch of a family that bends its back to resist the freaks of fate.
