Araya

The restoration of Margot Benacerraf's brilliant films Reveron and Araya will be a landmark in cinema history. Acclaimed as a forerunner of feminist Latina cinema, Araya was never released theatrically in the United States and 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 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. The Peredas family works at night in the salt marshes, the Ortiz are fishermen and the Salaz collect salt. The three 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, a feature documentary, the opposite of Italian neorealism” A film of such lasting beauty that Jean Renoir told Benacerraf after seeing the film: “Above all … don’t cut a single image!”

Bonus Features

Commentary by Margot Benacerraf

Margot Benacerraf's short film REVERON about the great Venezuelan painter

and more!

Reviews

"Lyrical and commanding…Benacerraf communicates the weight of hundreds of years of uninterrupted tradition. After building up this sense of timelessness, the filmmaker then so perfectly portrays the violent suddenness of the shift toward machination upon “Araya”'s conclusion that she manages to inspire both joy and sorrow at once, a testament to the success of her eloquent and elegiac evocation."—KRISTI MITSUDA, INDIEWIRE

"Wonderfully restored… I can compare the film only to Luchino Visconti's great LA TERRA TREMA for its combination of extraordinary beauty, outraged social conscience and almost mythic grandeur... The experience was stunning in 1959. It's every bit as stunning today."—STUART KLAWANS,THE NATION

"Majestic...Arresting...Overwhelming beauty!"—RICHARD BRODY, NEW YORKER MAGAZINE

"Thanks to Milestone Films' restoration of this semiforgotten 1959 cine-essay (a cowinner of the Fipresci Critics' Award at that year's Cannes), the movie's b&w images of craggy landscapes and shirtless young men have never looked more vibrant. A compadre of both Rossellini and Buñuel, Benacerraf has a knack for making neorealistic scenes of labor seem vaguely surreal (and vice versa)"—DAVID FEAR,TIME OUT NEW YORK