Interview with Araya Director Margot Benacerraf

This interview had been previously posted on Women & Hollywood and IONCinema, in different forms.


Interview with Araya Director Margot Benacerraf
by Melissa Silvestri

The Venezuelan director Margot Benacerraf may have only made two films, the 1950s documentaries Reveron and Araya, but her efforts in supporting great Latin American cinema over the past 45 years as the head of various film institutes and organizations have earned her the respect and honors as a pioneer female director in an era where there were few other female directors, save for Ida Lupino and Agnes Varda.

Largely forgotten due to lack of distribution, Araya was stunningly restored for its 50th anniversary, and re-released by Milestone films. It is running this month at the IFC Center in NYC. Joining the ranks of other lost documentary classics like I Am Cuba and Killer of Sheep, Araya is a hidden gem that was not only an early documentary, but subverted its format to be more of a narrative film and successfully blend reality and drama together. There is no doubt that it was a brilliantly innovative piece of work in 1959, since it shared the top prize with Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima, Mon Amour at that year’s Cannes Film Festival.

Araya, rather than being dry, follows the style of poetic realism, using a classic film score, staged scenes, established characters, and a direction to display the rare and beautiful world of Araya, a land on the cusp of industrialization, where families are connected through the many generations who have worked for over 450 years. Benacerraf displays a masterful eye for balancing truth with cinematic narrative. She gained the trust of the island’s families and was able to tell the story of a land hard and tough, yet with blinding white beauty in its salt pyramids. It showed the strength and grace the people’s work routines, and the love and respect shared amongst the families.

I got a chance to interview Benacerraf via email this week about her filming of Araya, her early years in Paris as a filmmaker, and the scene of female filmmakers in the 1950s.

Melissa Silvestri: Araya seems to be from another time and place altogether, pastoral communities separated from the mass market industry of the mainstream world, an environment that seems to be growing rarer due to increased industrialization and people moving into cities. I’m wondering what your thoughts are on that, if you believe such communities can still thrive without disappearing altogether due to pressures from the mainstream world.

Margot Benacerraf: There shouldn’t be many isolated communities left, and even if there are still any left, they would find it very difficult to resist the exterior pressures of the mainstream world. In any case, it is about, and it will always be about, asking to take into account the human problem before those very violent changes, with all that they bear. In the case of Araya, at the end of the film, I couldn’t give it a conclusion before the arrival of the machines because precisely as I was filming on a horse a world that was disappearing, another was beginning. I only had left raising a question with evident anguish because what I had observed nobody else considered to be a human problem. Unfortunately time would vindicate me. Not everything has been beneficial for the people of Araya.

MS: Was it difficult to gain the trust of the salt miners, or were they naturally at ease in front of a camera?


MB: No, because I went several times before shooting to share their lives, and become familiar to each other. So when I start shooting they didn’t run away and they accepted willingly and patiently the directions I gave them. They had never seen cameras around and they didn’t know exactly what it was all about. They just trust me. And think that every shot in the film is directed!


MS: Post WWII, there was a large boom in young filmmakers who came from all over the world, and creating these innovative films that gave a fresh modernity to filmmaking, whether making social or political statements, or bringing a poetic realism in with nonprofessional actors. You had studied in Paris, and I wanted to know what was it like to have been a part of that environment, and if you saw a great change from the previous generation.

MB: It was very significant to see how in the Cannes Festival of 1959 we matched up without knowing each other and without pre-established agreements with Truffaut and Alain Resnais. We were filmmakers eager to express ourselves differently so we were using new methods of production and looking for new forms to connect with the audience, and that’s why that Festival was so important. One can say that the eruption of the New Wave with all its investment and revolutionary marquee in that prestigious and classic Festival marked a before and after in filmmaking that without a doubt influenced the following generations.

MS: Were there other women directing at the time you made Araya?

MB: Very few. In the 50s, in France, there was Nicole Vedrés, Yannick Bellon, Agnes Varda, in the United States, there was Maya Deren and Shirley Clarke, and in Mexico, Matilde Landeta.

MS: What was it like to be a female director at a time where there were hardly any other women’s voices out there?

MB: I can’t say that being a woman has made my work difficult. I suffered the general conditions of a country where it was very difficult of make films. In the Venezuela of those times the filmmaking trade was practically unknown. In 1951, when I made my first film “Reverón” it was the only case of a female filmmaker. Later, 2 or 2 male filmmakers came more at the end of the 50s, but the difficulties were continuing to be the same for everyone.

MS:Since Latin American cinema is so broad and widespread across many different countries, is there a specific style or genre that you’re attracted to, either as a viewer or a supporter through your work in the cinema?

MB: What is known in literature as “the marvelous reality” or as “magical realism”, of those who Gabriel García Márquez and Alejo Carpentier are the most well-known exponents, and its parallelism in film especially attracts me. I recognize in that vision and in that form of expression one of the more interesting paths and big possibilities for the development of Latin American film.