Pitch

A child fascinated by airplanes makes us discover an 80 years old aviator-mechanic and instructress. Under her command, we fly in “Open Sky” an out-of-time voyage of pleasure where youth and old age meet …

Subject

“Non si volge chi a sua stella è fiso”

(He turns not back who is bound to a star)

Leonardo da Vinci

Eighty years old Miss Christiane Devleminck, a flight engineer and an outstanding aviatress, taught all day long and for more than fifty five years thousand of people to fly and in front of so much work she says without any vanity: «I have never worked, I played».

She conserves this youthful spirit and we film her as she transmits, with the same enthusiasm, the pleasure and passion for flying to a three year old child as well as to her pupils or friends whatever their age. She has managed to make her dream come true and has always believed in it! Fifty five thousand hours of flight, more than eight years spent in the air! She chose to inhabit the sky rather than the earth. She regrets nothing and doesn’t consider herself different from other women. Fearless and determinate, an iron hand in a velvet glove, with her own sense of humour, she never let herself feel indifferent. She could spend hours repairing the motor of her Aztec in the biting cold of her hangar, hands full of dirty oil, without ever complaining. Our camera follows her and notes her childlike intense curiosity as she examines the landing gear of her twin-engine. She feels for her mechanical birds which allow her to fly a unique love and respect.

Flight is what gives her the most complete happiness! Miss Devleminck gets transformed in the open sky and talks as she never does on the ground. What an emotion it is to look at landscapes from high above, what pleasure a disengagement, spins, loopings, and the laughter of the «Miss» who revels in flying through the clouds skilfully and with a great precision ...

Private archives – films on Super 8  and on 8mm format – allow us also to take into account the history of our aviatress. They take us to Switzerland, to Davos, the icy lake where, in 1948, Christiane Devleminck began her career with Friedrich Vissel and Hermann Geiger: we see her, as a snow rescuer, take off and land on short slopes of mountains; in 1953 we find her in the aviation school at the Grimbergen airport; in 1982 we follow her on a dangerous transatlantic flight to the United States, which was interrupted only by technical landings in Greenland and which, finally, brought her to New-York. At the end, in 2001, we attend the celebration organised for her fifty thousand hours of flying where, seventy seven years old, she takes off and performs acrobatic figures in the sky with the legendary hunting plane Fuga-Magister.

In the air, the differences between being old and being young cease to exist as regards Christiane Devleminck.

Her way of flying can easily be compared to Giora Feidman’s (clarinettist) music where humour and poetry mingle skilfully.

This documentary is an invitation to the pleasure of flying, the transmission of this passion, a hymn to the sky’s magic spell, a portrait of a woman who flew across the sky.

Humble and solitary, Christiane Devleminck is bound to a star and doesn’t turn back. Only death will stop her ascent.