MBC Interactive Archive Project: ARAYA

When: Thursday, January 30 at 7:00 P.M.

Where: O Cinema South Beach, 1130 Washington Avenue

About: The peninsula of Araya in northeastern Venezuela is one of the most arid places on earth. For five hundred years, since its discovery by the Spanish, the region’s salt has been exploited manually. A 17th-century fortress built to protect against pirate raids stands as a reminder of the days when salt was worth almost as much as gold and great fortunes were made. Benacerraf captures the life of the salineros and their back-breaking work in breathtaking images. Three family stories underline the harsh life of this region — all of which vanished with the arrival of industrial exploitation.

ARAYA was originally compared to Flaherty’s Man of Aran, Visconti’s La Terra Trema (1947) and Rossellini’s India (1957). Margot Benacerraf has described the film as “a cinematic narration based on script writing rather than a spontaneous action…the opposite of Italian neorealism.” The film is of such lasting beauty that Jean Renoir told Benacerraf after seeing the film: “Above all … don’t cut a single image!”