A film based on a Julio Cortazar story signals a mixture of Kafkaesque disorientation and cynical fantasy. Nina Grosse's The Glass Sky is a moody, stylish adaptation of Cortazar's story "El Otro Cielo." Set in a Paris where everyone speaks German, it tells of a young office clerk, Julien (Helmut Berger), caught between the demands of his invalid mother and his insistent mistress. Amidst a city-wide panic over a series of unsolved stranglings, one morning Julien awakens from a nightmare in which he has seen a woman strangled in an aquarium. On his way to work he sees the woman, and then the strangler, of his dream. Following their trail through a Parisian labyrinth of arcades and subterranean gangways leads him to Bichette, a prostitute whose laughter captivates him. Soon Julien has stopped going to work and moved into a seedy hotel near the glass-ceilinged arcade where Bichette works, and the mystery deepens... Nina Grosse won a 1988 German Film Prize for this first feature (in the company this year of Wim Wenders, Hark Bohm, Percy Adlon and Uwe Schrader). The film showed at the Berlin, Montreal and Venice Film Festivals.