In 1959, ARAYA shared the prestigious International Critics Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. But for fifty years, the film was largely overlooked and forgotten, until Milestone's theatrical release in 2009. Critics and audiences were stunned by the glowing cinematography, powerful story and the passionate love for the culture that director Margot Benacerraf had captured so many decades before. Although critics in the 1950s compared ARAYA to Robert Flaherty's Man of Aran, Benacerraf never
intended to make a documentary. The film was meticulously planned as a tone poem in which image, music, sound and language combine to create a moving and magical exploration of a desolate place and the remarkable people who lived there. Benacerraf's cinematic tour de force explores a day in the lives of three families living in Araya, an arid peninsula in northeastern Venezuela. For centuries, since its discovery by the Spanish, the region's salt was collected and stacked into radiant white pyramids. Benacerraf captured breathtaking and unforgettable images, from the salineros toiling to build the mountains of salt, to fishermen hauling in huge teeming nets, to a young girl and her grandmother laying "flowers" of shells on windswept graves.
Like the late famed anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the movie wants to find a culture and explain it to the world. Araya finds a degree of romance in that discovery, and is weaker for it.
Margot Benacerraf's starkly beautiful 1959 documentary Araya is the rare film whose austere stylistic impersonality is a key aspect of its elemental power.
Be grateful that Araya is here, in an exquisitely restored print, with images of struggling Venezuelan peasants as luminous as the Mexican photographs of Edward Weston.
The movie is visually stunning, deploying fluid camerawork and stark black-and-white imagery to record the hardscrabble lives of Venezuelans living and working on a remote salt marsh.
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