MIAMI.- Los films Revern (1952) y Araya (1959) from Venezuelan filmmaker Margot Benacerraf arrive at the platform catalog streaming Guayaba, an audiovisual content service that brings together and promotes the dissemination of Latin American film projects.
The Margot Benacerraf Foundation confirmed this fact through a statement on Instagram.
“The emblematic films of Margot Benacerraf have been included in the special programming organized to celebrate the second anniversary of Guayaba with a tribute to the pioneering and founding directors of cinema on the continent,” reads the writing.
Margot Benacerraf is one of Venezuela’s most prominent filmmakers, as well as a pioneer in her country’s film industry at a time when the institution was led by men. With his documentary Revern, The director made her way into the international arena.
The documentary was shown at the Berlin Festival in June 1953, and at the Edinburgh Festival in August 1953. It was also screened at the French Cinematheque and the Belgian Cinematheque of the Palace of Fine Arts in Brussels; and later, in November 1953, it was selected by the French Association of Film and Television Critics to be screened at the opening of the Art and Essay Cinema Hall of the Etoile Studio in Paris.
Seven years later, in 1959, Benacerraf screened his piece Araya at the Cannes Film Festival and on May 15 the documentary won the Grand Prix of International Critics (Fipresci), equally con Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais), and the Higher Technical Commission Award for the photographic style that highlights the sound environment of the project.
“It’s been 60 years and there has been no way for people to understand that Araya It is not a documentary but a poetic narrative, that is how they accepted it in Cannes. I have nothing against the documentary, I have always defended it, but a documentary is a genre that limits you in a certain way, and Araya It is an attempt to transcend the documentary. Araya, Under its apparent simplicity, it is a very complicated thing because at the same time of coexisting and using Italian neorealism, it gives me freedom as a director,” Benacerraf said in 2019 during an interview she gave to the magazine Clmax.
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The service was created with the objective of promoting films, short films, documentaries and fiction films, classic or contemporary, from the Latin American film industry.
“Guayaba was born in 2022, as the platform that articulates, curates and shows exceptional films from Latin America. It is a project created by filmmakers, cinephiles and cinephiles for people who, like you, are marked by the cinema of this part of the world or want to discover it. “, indicates the website of the streaming.
On the occasion of its second anniversary, and as part of the tribute to the pioneering women of the region, the platform also added the titles to its catalog Chircales by the Colombian Marta Rodríguez (1972), nobody’s lady by the Argentine Mara Luisa Bemberg (1982) and a wall of silence by the Argentine Lita Stantic (1993).
“Thanks to Guayaba you can delve into the diversity of a cinema that does not always reach theaters, and that you will hardly find on other platforms. A cinema made by established and emerging filmmakers, where fiction and documentary coexist, the drive to experiment and the love for cinematographic genres,” adds the text signed by Antonia Girardi, Programming Director of the platform.
The service is available throughout the American continent, Germany, Austria, Czechia, Spain, France, Italy, Portugal, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
