Once Upon a Time in Venezuela: The country's Oscar nom is a years-long portrait of a toxified village divided by faith in Chavistas
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B-plus
In Venezuela, with its estimated 96 per cent poverty rate, almost everyone is struggling. But citizens of Congo Mirador, a town of 30 families on the Caribbean inlet of Lake Maracaibo, have a unique problem: Oily sedimentary sludge.
Said sludge is produced by the upstream oil drilling operations, killing the fishing industry and threatening to swallow the town in rising sediment and water.
A Venezuelan fishing village becomes a kind of toxic Venice in Once Upon a Time in Venezuela.
Filmmaker Anabel Rodriguez Rios’ lyrical documentary, Once Upon a Time in Venezuela, is the country’s official entry for the international feature Oscar. It was shot over several years, tuned into events of daily life as much as the political and economic turmoil that has broken that country.
The result is a film that is presented as a kind of a fable, and a microcosm of a country whose fortunes once depended on oil.
Rodriguez Rios focuses on two women on opposite sides of the political divide: Tamara, a middle-aged political organizer and farm owner is a fervent believer in the late socialist president Hugo Chavez. She has a poster of him at her front door - and requires each visitor to touch it before making an entrance. Since his 2013 death, she believes just as passionately in his successor, Nicolás Maduro.
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On the other side, there is the schoolteacher, Natalia, a young mother who uses her own resources to run the school, on a structure hanging over the open waters. Because Natalia is opposed to Maduro’s regime, Tamara is determined to get her fired, encouraging various local Chavista officials to inspect and harass her into quitting.
Tamara is a bully, open to buying votes. But she cares about her community: She believes that the government is good and will eventually come through on the long-promised plan to dredge the estuary and save the town. When she finally gets a chance to travel to Caracas for a meeting with the governor, she sits in disappointed silence while he fields phone calls and speaks a few platitudes but offers no promises.
Like the rising waters, the dramatic conflict of the narrative takes its time to be felt. Kids play on boats and are scolded by their elders. There are babies to be washed and food to be prepared and fiestas and beauty pageants to organize. Fishermen continue to ply their dwindling trade, despite the polluted waters
And throughout the film, a scrawny old magician plays guitar and sings love ballads from his days as a professional performer. Yet, there’s menace here too, including scenes of people practicing, using their guns before the 2018 election, throngs both triumphant and outraged. There are dead livestock from the polluted waters and vultures perched on hydro polls.
If there’s a fault with Once Upon a Time in Venezuela, it feels too elegiac and poetically-crafted to represent the extent of the country’s crash (by some estimates, almost 20 percent of the population is already in exile).
In contrast, Margarita Cadenas’ 2017 film, Women of the Venezuelan Chaos, is a snapshot of spiraling emergency: An undersupplied emergency room nurse forced to choosing who lives and dies, mothers lining up through the night for rations, rampant street violence and political arrests and killings. Once Upon a Time in Venezuela is less a microcosm of the larger disaster than one of its milder aftershocks.
Once Upon a Time in Venezuela, directed by Anabel Rodriguez Rios, is available through the Topic Streaming Service at www.topic.com. The service – accessible via Apple iOS, AppleTV, Android, Amazon Fire TV, and Roku - is US$5.99 a month or $4.99 a month annually. A seven-day trial period is free.