Following up on from the vault releases of Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep and Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles (a pair of films which I have criminally still yet to see), Milestone Films has restored and presenting what is labeled as a Venezuelan Masterwork called Araya. The Cannes winner (it shared the International Critics Prize with Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima, Mon Amour) is opening at the IFC Center on October 7th, 2009. Margot Benacerraf (a one time filmmaker) will be in attendance.
A film that Jean Renoir said “Don’t Cut a Single Frame”, sees Benacerraf’s portray a day in the life of three families living in one of the harshest places on earth — Araya, an arid peninsula in northeastern Venezuela. For 450 years, since its discovery by the Spanish, the region’s salt was manually collected and stacked into glowing white pyramids. Overlooking the area, a 17th-century fortress built to protect against pirate raids stood as a reminder of the days when the mineral was worth as much as gold and great fortunes were made in the salt trade. Benacerraf captures the grueling work of these salineros in breathtaking high-contrast black-and-white images. Her camera gracefully pans and glides to reveal the landscape and the people of the peninsula. All night, the Pereda family toils in the salt marshes. In the morning, the Salaz clan arrives to load and stack the crystals under the hot brutal sun. Down the coastline, the Ortiz family fish and tend their nets, while the youngest member, Carmen, collects seashells and coral.
