MARGOT BENACERRAF - ARAYA

“And below the everyday, uncover the unusual,” wrote Berthold Brecht in 1959 after having discovered Araya. The restoration of Margot Benacerraf’s masterpiece is a landmark in cinema history. Acclaimed as a forerunner of feminist Latina cinema, Araya has all but been forgotten since the initial acclaim it garnered when it shared the Cannes International Critics Prize with Hiroshima, Mon Amour. Araya, a peninsula in Venezuela, is one of the most arid places on earth. For five hundred years the region’s salt has been exploited manually. Benacerraf (1926) captures the life of the salineros and their backbreaking work in breathtaking images. Three different stories underline the harsh life of this region — all of which vanished with the arrival of industrial exploitation. Benacerraf has described her film as “a cinematic narration based on script writing rather than a spontaneous action, a feature documentary, the opposite of Italian neo-realism”. Or as Jean Renoir told her after seeing the film: “Above all … don’t cut a single image!"

Araya. Margot Benacerraf

1959, 35 mm, 82’, black & white, Spanish spoken, English subtitles