Year
1959
Language
Spanish spoken, English subtitles
Director
Margot Benacerraf
Duration
90 min
Margot Benacerraf's brilliant Araya is a milestone in film history. The hybrid documentary was hailed as a masterpiece of poetic cinema.
The film is regarded as a precursor to Latin American feminist cinema. Margot Benacerraf captures the lives of three families of salt miners and their arduous labor in breathtaking imagery in a wondrous black-and-white film marinated in sun, salt, and sweat.
Araya is renowned for its striking visual beauty: the carefully framed black-and-white cinematography transforms the salt flats of eastern Venezuela into a monumental, almost sculptural landscape. The film is a fusion of documentary and visual poetry that renders the harshness of the environment and working conditions with striking formal elegance. It elevates documentary observation into a meditative, almost architectural form of cinema.
8:00 PM - 9:50 PM
€ 13.00
Camera 2
During the Cinematic Beauty film programme, we take you on a journey through seven beautiful classics from around the world, each of which sheds a different light on beauty. What is the purpose of beauty in these films, and how does it contribute to what a film wants to tell us? In collaboration with a team of film scholars from the University of Groningen, Cinematic Beauty seeks answers to these questions.
