Benacerraf’s film portrays a day in the life of three families living in one of the harshest places on earth. Araya, an isolated and arid peninsula in northeastern Venezuela, where for 450 years following its discovery by the Spanish, the region’s salt was manually collected and stacked into glowing white pyramids. Overlooking the stark landscape, the 17th-century fortress that was built to withstand pirate raids is a reminder of the days when salt was as valuable as gold, and great fortunes were made from the grueling labor of ‘salineros‘ salt workers who toiled in sweltering heat beneath a scorching sun. In stunning high-contrast black and white images, Araya captures the harsh landscape and shows a single day in the lives of three hard-working families: the Peredas toil in the salt marshes by night, the Salaz clan arrives at dawn to load and stack the crystals and, down the coastline, the Ortiz family set and tend their fish nets. As a recent conversation with Benacerref’s approach to making Araya was unique, and the result is a fascinating mixture of poetic, narrative and documentary elements in a film that defies genres and has withstood the test of time to become an authentic document in its own right, one that shows the clash between a traditional culture and modern mechanisms of change.
MERIN: Congratulations on the restoration of Araya and the fact that it‘s finally getting a release in the U.S. You must be very gratified…
BENACERRAF:: I’m very excited, and I’m also very anxious because so many years have gone past since I’ve seen it. Imagine! It was in 1959 -- that’s exactly 50 years ago that it premiered at Cannes, and won the International Critics Award with Hiroshima Mon Amour, by Alain Renais. I think it’s extraordinary that I can see all of this happening now.
MERIN: Yes, it’s great. And you seem to have a synchronicity with Alain Renais, who’s just directed a new film, Wild Grass, and is also now in New York for a short time.
BENACERRAF:: Oh, I like him very much and we shared the prize together…
MERIN: Yes, I know, that’s why I mentioned him. But tell me, how did this second life come about for your film Araya?
BENACERRAF:: Well, it was unexpected. There has been a lot of confusion about the film, because it’s not so easy to classify. It got a lot of attention after the Cannes Film Festival. Well, even before we got the prizes, China and Canada bought it, and then after the prizes most everyone bought it -- except for the United States and my own country, Venezuela. They said it was a difficult film -- not a documentary, not fiction, but a poetic film -- and that’s difficult to classify.
Cannes accepted it in competition at the highest level, with Hiroshima Mon Amour and it didn’t matter if it was fiction or documentary -- they said it was a cinematographic revolution, a new way of telling a story that was unique to Venezuela.
MERIN: I’ve seen and heard the film referred to as a documentary, yet you say it’s not. Why is that?
BENACERRAF:: It was not intended to be documentary. It was intended to be a poetic film, a poetic statement or a 24-hour saga about the lives of the three families, and how they relate to the land and each other.
MERIN: Did you work from a script? Did you use actors, or the real people who were living on the peninsula?
BENACERRAF:: I had a meticulously detailed script that was written after a long period of investigation with the people, and then it was shot very fast, very fast -- because the salt mines were disappearing and the new way of getting the salt was coming in. We had to shoot very fast to tell the story of the people that I just love. And, I think their story is so interesting.
MERIN: Did you choose the families before or after you wrote the script?
BENACERRAF:: Before. The script was based on the families who actually lived there -- but I also composed families and relationships. For example, the grandmother and daughter are not really related to each other, and also the lovers, they really hated each other. So the family structure is the same, but I did do some changing. But they are the people who live there, not actors.
MERIN: I think that’s quite unusual, and it interests me because I’m curious about the definition of documentary cinema and how it differs from fiction filmmaking. I think the borders between the genres are blurry…
BENACERRAF:: Yes…
MERIN: It’s interesting, for example, that fiction features often use archival footage, and documentaries are using more and more non-verite elements such as graphics, infra red cameras, special effects and entering into still photos as though they’re living environments. And, in a way, you could say that all movies are documents -- artifacts, if you will -- of their times.
BENACERRAF:: Yes, that’s right…
MERIN: And then the director -- you -- are an artist who takes something you’ve accidentally found in nature or in human society -- Araya and the families -- and changes it, transforming the accidental encounters into art…
BENACERRAF:: Yes, actually you can see that in my script, too. For example, I wrote it so that there is the tight structure with Take 20 and Take 21, and so forth, and they are very specific with everything in detail, but I also left open spaces so when I found something that happened -- those accidents -- that I hadn’t expected, I could just insert them, find the right place where they would fit and belong.
