Tribeca Film Festival '25: Cuerpo Celeste, Trying to Define the Sky

Image Credit: Tribeca Film Festival

In the midst of the collapse of the Chilean military junta as well as a drastic upheaval of her life, a 15 year old Celeste also finds herself navigating the transition between being a child and an adult. Naya Ilic’s 2025 film, Cuerpo Celeste, is a film about transitions amongst transitions. Celeste finds herself in an exploration of her sexuality and the world around her — primarily through her romance with two different boys that have taken interest in her. She finds herself moving between the desert and the ocean, facing what both places mean to her and the people that she associates with each vastly different space and time in her life. To even exist as the sky is to be in between these spaces and to only have the capability of being measured by the ground around you.

For as grand of a story as the film sounds, Cuerpo Celeste actually finds itself to be fairly quiet. It’s minimalistic in its story — Ilic often lets us sit in silence with these characters. More often, she places the conversations between characters in a wide open frame, engulfing our protagonist in the ocean and desert environments around her. Only occasionally does the film divert to highly stylized yet almost entirely wordless analog film sequences with a 4:3 aspect ratio. Cuerpo Celeste, similarly to its cinematography, finds its most important elements to exist on the edges of its viewpoint. There’s a moment in which Celeste murmurs to her parents that nobody tells her anything. Her parents, of course, take this with a grain of salt and they as a family begin to shout to literally shout the word “Nada!” to the echoes of the desert. The beach, really, only acts as a temporary oasis to this desert — as we never really leave this shouting of nothing at nothing by the end. And, even though I have successfully connected with Celeste, I want more. I am parched.

Hints of Pinochet’s military dictatorship find their way into the subplots and primarily audio backgrounds of Celeste’s worlds. The exhumation of mass graves within Celeste’s town and one of her love interests’ involvement with drug dealers are subplots that are kept at an arm’s length away from where it feels as though the subplots should be. Cuerpo Celeste feels as though it should be a deeply political film. But the politics of the film that are intended to define Celeste are never quite fully able to frame the sky around it. Instead, we are left with a space wide open, and where the film feels as though it had the ability to explore her coming of age alongside a country being reborn feels intangible.

Where I’m Still Here, Walter Salles’ 2024 film about a family amongst the military dictatorship of Brazil, positions itself from the viewpoint of a mother attempting to maintain normalcy amongst tragedy, Cuerpo Celeste positions itself from the receiving end of the same intent. It’s true that kids often do not care or are not even aware of the larger socio-political contexts that surround them. The fact that Celeste’s main story is centered around her exploration of her sexuality and relationship with her mother is a brilliant choice in the intent to position a film this way. But, when a crucial part of Celeste’s journey to her adulthood comes to be in discovering the rougher edges of her world that she has been sheltered from by the adults that tell her nothing, it gets difficult to believe that she has moved beyond being completely sheltered from the horrors of the world when they still feel so far away from her. The bookend of the film is quite literally in a different shooting style and format, placing the actual exhumation of the mass graves far away from the visual world of where Celeste is to us in the desert.

In a way, the mechanism built into the film of the denial of the adults in Celeste’s world to allow her into what is happening and the hell that they are protecting her from is its own barrier as much as it is a great concept. But I refuse to state that it is an issue of accessibility in regards to the history. Anyone who has a base level of knowledge of military dictatorships would have an easy time piecing together what is happening in the world of the film beyond our eye. But if Cuerpo Celeste’s greatest barrier to itself is in the mere fact that Celeste is a teenager, then how can it even begin to define the transitory space that it exists within?

Cuerpo Celeste, much like its settings, its love interests, and its before and after, is split into a distinct ‘two’. One film is the film that it is — a coming of age that in actuality works very well in what it is. It’s beautiful. Ilic’s direction and the visual style cultivated allows us to truly sit in the environments, and the writing brings us to very easily care about the characters and relationships that they have with each other. The other film is one about the horror of discovering that the world as you knew it was incorrect, and realizing the lengths that the people around you have gone to protect you from it. The task this film brings upon itself of finding the limits of the sky is one that is nearly impossible to traverse. But Ilic is right about where we find ourselves in the end. Perhaps it ends with finding peace in admitting at the top of your lungs that you know nothing, and that the journey out of our own childishness is never over.