ARAYA
Directed by Margot Benacerraf
Written by Benacerraf & Pierre Seghers
Released by Milestones Films
Spanish with English subtitles
Venezuela/France. 82 min. Not Rated
Narrated by José Ignacio Cabrujas 
 

In Margot Benacerraf’s film Araya—long unavailable in America since its debut in 1959—we’re taken to the seaside world off of the northern Venezuela coast, where there is next to no way to survive off the land. Instead, the population has lived off of the sea, having harvested salt for hundreds of years. 

Benacerraf is both a documentarian and an artist, and the two cross paths frequently. The first provides a purely educational sense of the place, the nature of work, how salt is made, and who these people are closed-off from the rest of the modern world. In terms of just pure informative content, the film’s like a National Geographic episode.

Much of the information in the narration is insightful, from little tidbits like how “On open skin, salt is a deep wound” (with a visual demonstration), and for those interested, we even get a history of salt at the very start of the film. But this is really a secondary reason for Araya’s existence. Benacerraf is in love with her camera, and wants us to see this world like it’s out of the most eye-catching picture book we’ve ever seen (or, as the press notes describes the film, a “visual tone poem”). From the opening shots of clouds and the sea as seen through an ethereal viewpoint, to the shots of the barren wastelands near the village of Araya (seen in a frightening montage at the highpoint of the sweltering sun), to the faces of the villagers, there’s a vast array of sumptuous, stark eye candy to be seen here.

If there is a problem with the film, it’s that these two methods of creating distinct moods and capturing these little-seen landscapes, combined with the story of the villagers and their daily grind, don’t always mesh easily. I found myself looking forward to the next series of images as opposed to the narration, which drags in some spots. 

And yet even with this minor gripe, it’s a wonderful black-and-white spectacle on a population who would never have had light shed on them if not for Benacerraf and her great eye for detail. That it was her only feature film, and at the time of its release winning acclaim at Cannes, makes it something of a minor wonder in the history of documentary film. Jack Gattanella
October 9, 2009