Araya

New restoration!

In the days when salt was worth its weight in gold, Spanish colonists in the Araya peninsula of northeast Venezuela built a fortress to guard against pirates; now only ruins lie at the center of Margot Benacerraf’s lyrical portrait of three salt worker families in one of the driest places on Earth. A film of such lasting beauty that Jean Renoir told Benacerraf after seeing the film: “Above all… don’t cut a single image!”

(Margot Benacerraf, 1959, Venezuela, Spanish w/ Eng subs, 90 mins, DCP)