NEW 35MM RESTORATION & TORONTO PREMIERE!

"Wonderfully restored… I can compare the film only to Luchino Visconti's great La Terra Trema for its combination of extraordinary beauty, outraged social conscience and almost mythic grandeur... The experience was stunning in 1959. It's every bit as stunning today" (Stuart Klawans, The Nation).

One of the most beautiful restorations of 2009 made from the original camera negative, Araya is Margot Benacerraf’s 1959 Cannes prize-winning cine-tone poem to the salt harvesters in the Araya lagoon in the northeastern part of Venezuela. A centuries-old tradition, the salt mines in Araya (a now extinct region) are shimmering pyramids that jut up from the stubbornly infertile landscape, glistening like crystals through the film’s gorgeous, high-contrast, black-and-white photography. Employing a style somewhere between Joris Ivens and Marguerite Duras, the film luxuriates in the setting’s barren beauty while witnessing the toil of survival amid the poverty and injustice of the region’s fishing and salt industries. Inspired by Eisenstein’s ¡Que Viva Mexico!, Araya is a curious mix of ethnography, lyricism and incantatory poetry, which yields a captivating tension between social commentary and the politics of representation. An inherent eroticism comes to the fore as sweaty, sculpted torsos slog in the hot sun—a burning metaphor for the swelling revolution about to explode in Venezuela. "Majestic….Arresting....Overwhelming beauty!" (Richard Brody, New Yorker Magazine).

Rated PG.