''Araya'' is a 1959

Venezuela Venezuela (; ), officially the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela ( es, link=no, República Bolivariana de Venezuela), is a country on the northern coast of South America, consisting of a continental landmass and many islands and islets in th ...

n documentary film directed by

Margot Benacerraf Margot Benacerraf (born August 14, 1926) is a Venezuelan director of Moroccan Jewish descent. Benacerraf was one of the first Latin American filmmakers to study at IDHEC (''Institut des hautes études cinématographiques'') in Paris. Work Benace ...

and co-written by Benacerraf and Pierre Seghers.

Plot

The film depicts the lives of labourers who extract salt from the sea off the Araya Peninsula in Venezuela. Their method for extracting

salt Salt is a mineral composed primarily of sodium chloride (NaCl), a chemical compound belonging to the larger class of salts; salt in the form of a natural crystalline mineral is known as rock salt or halite. Salt is present in vast quant ...

, virtually unchanged for centuries, depends on gruelling physical labor, but provides a dependable, if meagre, living for the men and their families. The film ends with a recently built plant for mechanised salt extraction that could eliminate the community's traditional source of income.

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

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 A soundtrack is recorded music accompanying and synchronised to the images of a motion picture, drama, book, television program, radio program, or video game; a commercially released soundtrack album of music as featured in the soundtrack ...

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

Reception

The film was entered into the

1959 Cannes Film Festival The 12th Cannes Film Festival was held from 30 April to 15 May 1959. The Palme d'Or went to the ''Orfeu Negro'' by Marcel Camus. The festival opened with '' Les Quatre Cents Coups'', directed by François Truffaut and closed with ''The Diary of An ...

, where it shared the Cannes International Critics Prize with

Alain Resnais Alain Resnais (; 3 June 19221 March 2014) was a French film director and screenwriter whose career extended over more than six decades. After training as a film editor in the mid-1940s, he went on to direct a number of short films which included ...

's ''

Hiroshima mon amour ''Hiroshima mon amour'' (, lit. , ), is a 1959 romantic drama film directed by French director Alain Resnais and written by French author Marguerite Duras. Resnais' first feature-length work, it was a co-production between France and Japan, an ...

''. The audience at Cannes doubted Benacerraf's claim that the film has been shot by a two-man crew, especially due to the dramatic shots from a crane, Benacerraf responded that they had merely made use of a vacant crane left at the mine. In 2009,

Milestone Films Milestone Film and Video is an independent film distribution company, founded in 1990 in the United States by Dennis Doros and Amy Heller. The company researches and distributes cinematographic material from around the world, including silent film, ...

released ''Araya'' in North American theaters for the first time as well as rereleasing it internationally. Milestone also distributes a restored

DVD The DVD (common abbreviation for Digital Video Disc or Digital Versatile Disc) is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 1995 and first released on November 1, 1996, in Japan. The medium can store any kind ...

version of the film.

References

External links

Araya
Distributor Milestone Film's official site for the film * * 1959 films French black-and-white films Venezuelan black-and-white films 1950s Spanish-language films 1959 documentary films French documentary films Venezuelan documentary films Documentary films about Venezuela Black-and-white documentary films 1950s French films {{France-documentary-film-stub