Araya

Araya (1959)

"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.

Date of release
1959-08-31
TMDB
7.2 / 10 (33)
Runtime
1h 30m
Genres
Documentary
Director
Margot Benacerraf

Casting

Interesting facts

Araya is a 1959 Venezuelan feature film directed by Margot Benacerraf and co-written by Benacerraf and Pierre Seghers.

Filming

Araya was produced by a two-person crew consisting of Margot Benacerraf and her cameraman Giuseppe Nisoli. On arriving at the arid and barren landscape of the Araya peninsula on the north coast of Venezuela, Benacerraf remarked it was like "arriving on the moon". Although colour photography was available to Benacerraf and Nisoli, the decision was made to shoot in black and white, as it was deemed a more powerful way of portraying the subjects.

The soundtrack to Araya includes sounds from the sea, remixed in diverse ways including playing in reverse. Benacerraf noted that the Andalusian polo songs, rare in Venezuela, had lasted due to the extreme isolation of the Araya community.

Benacerraf has argued on several occasions that Araya is not a documentary but rather a poetic narrative, genre in which it was accepted at the Cannes Film Festival.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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