"Araya" is an old natural salt mine located in a peninsula in northeastern Venezuela which was still, by 1959, being exploited manually five hundred years after its discovery by the Spanish. In images, the life of the "salineros" and their archaic methods of work before their definite disappearance with the arrival of the industrial exploitation.
阿拉亚
France
Cannes Film Festival
Venezuela
France
Venezuela
85
A testament to the immobile, the repetitive, the swing of labor, rising and falling like waves peppered with bubbles along the sand. Cinema as narration, detachment of the visceral and the common-place, the source of all life. Might be a more than a tad reductive to compare to Roma, as this is Venezuelan and within the Documentary form, but both of their roots are immersed in the mechanics of labor, and the faces they document. Quite moving.
The slow rhythm of eternity. Araya is cinematic art in its purest form. It exists as cinema designed to immortalise a people and a culture. At its centre is a community built upon centuries of tradition. Their lives are encased inside a closed economy, where fish and salt define their entire material world. Araya is beautifully made, shot with carefully composed movements that capture an endless sky, people moving to a rhythm, and salt built into mountains. Araya is a film of endless life, despite its focused setting. It is a film of labour at its most essential and simple. Men and women work so they can live. It's not much, but that's the cycle that this community, and indeed…
1st Margot Benacerraf
Araya feels like science fiction in places. That’s not a comment on the subject matter, though. Rather, it’s the incredible black and white photography and the score (especially the score) that renders the world of Venezuelan salt mines similar to a far-off worlds. Those strings, that percussion, recalled so strongly of original series Star Trek that I had to check my copy at one point. It feels like a distant cousin to Werner Herzog’s Lessons from Darkness, the ways that hostile environments are turned into alien vistas, but with Benacerraf, I’m willing to bet the science fiction-vibe I’m getting is incidental.
Instead, it’s ironically what Herzog goes for in all his cinema, that sense of the sublime.…
Soy de Falcón (Venezuela), de la península. Esta película me transporta a mi infancia, cuándo mi mamá era médico rural en zonas costeras, al lado de la playa. Esta película es del 59 y yo nací a finales de los 90’s. me sorprende ver cómo a pesar de existir casi cuarenta años de diferencia entre el documental y mi infancia, en estos fotogramas veo mis recuerdos. Niños y mujeres con el cabello rubio de tanto llevar sol, buscan sal y hacen los trabajos de la casa. Hombres que trabajan incasablemente durante todo el día, pescan y vuelven a casa apenas se esconde el sol. Recuerdo hacerme amiga de un niño que tenía su propio botecito de madera, su papá la…
In the peninsula of Araya, life is run by salt. Salt and sun. Sun and salt. And sweat. Sun and salt and sweat. If the repetitive proposition of reading those three words until they've been drilled into your cranium doesn't sound appealing to you, then perhaps Margot Benacerraf's acclaimed documentary may not be your (salty) cup of tea. Of course, monotony and submission through repetitiveness is something that Araya embeds in the very fabric of its existence; Benacerraf's goal is clearly to draw us into the hopeless futility of these poor villagers whose entire lives revolve around mining a salt marsh in sweltering heat, day in and day out. That may be the point, but there's one problem that keeps…
Una obra que se siente inspirada por el neorrealismo italiano, aunque Araya fácilmente podría considerarse su propio género. Es un documental que filosofa abiertamente sobre la explotación de la clase trabajadora y el costumbrismo de los salineros en la península de Araya, en el estado Sucre de Venezuela.
El lente de Margot Benacerraf se pasea lentamente no solo por el lugar, sino por la historia del mismo. Es un retrato del abandono de Araya y sus habitantes, que ya por esa época era sinónimo de desolación y marginación social. Pero su observación está lejos de ser victimista y explotadora.
Como las mejores directoras, Benacerraf no reduce a sus sujetos de estudio a simples mártires del sistema. En su lugar los…
☆"From the marriage of the Sea and the Sun, salt was born on this Land."☆
NOPEtober 2021 -- Film #26 of 31
I'm thirsty.
The only feature film from Margot Benacerraf is a stunning document of a place of timeless history and beauty amidst modern exploration of resources and its people. Araya is the story of the salt mines of Venezuela not far from the Caribbean Sea, the rise and fall of the Araya Fortress, and the men and women who worked under brutal conditions for overseas empires and their own country for this precious commodity. Co-winner of the International Critics Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, it's a beautifully filmed tone poem on the remarkable inhabitants of this corner…
Seen at the Festival de Cine Venezolano 2019.
The way Araya tells its story is intriguing and quite masterful. Margot Benacerraf's work behind the camera is to tell a story that works the same way if you take away the visuals or you mute the audio. It's a haunting tale about tradition and hard work with masterful and genius visuals. We get a first row seat to see the lives of the workers of a salt mine in eastern Venezuela and how the mining of the salt was a family tradition and a way of surviving for them for many years.
The music is ludicrous, and the cinematography is beyond perfect, and seeing it on the big screen, as a…
Vista en el Festival de Cine Venezolano 2024.
"Daniela ya la habías visto ¿Por que otro rewatch? Ve otra".
Mismo caso que la anterior peli que reseñe, se la quería mostrar a quién me acompaño al Festival. Le encanto.
Nada es igual que ver una película en una sala de cine y no iba a perder la oportunidad de ver Araya para confirmar que, incluso 65 años después, esta película no ha envejecido para nada. Una joya del cine venezolano y un archivo de la historia del país.
Siempre tendremos Araya.
Gracias Margot Benacerraf, descansa en paz.
Quest for the Green Map - Venezuela
Equal parts harrowing and hypnotic. This movie looks so beautiful that you almost forget just how draining and miserable the conditions you're seeing actually are. While I enjoyed the droning musings of the narrator, I can't help but think that these incredible images would have even more impact if the narration was cut down to just some neccessary context.
But boy, I sure love running water, air conditioning, and the progress made by labor unions.
A film that acts like the very salt mine it covers by preserving a particular way of life. Not as homoerotic as the poster suggests. A shame!
Gorgeously vivid ethnography that repurposes the typically exoticizing gaze into one of romantic empathy, building a dreamscape of tradition against the encroaching destabilization of industry - the threat is towards both a people and their land, that fraternity faced with acceleration and dehumanization. How loud the image shouts: the sensuality of the labouring body, its friction against the sun, the water and the salt; the velocity of cogs, its metal juxtaposed to skin, its desolate violation of nature.
Doomed history in the wake of modernity.
