Terra Mater – Mother Land / Araya

Tue 04.06.
20:00

Cinema

Arsenal 1

Terra Mater – Mother Land

TERRA MATER – MOTHER LAND crafts a oneiric portrait of a landscape equal parts natural and human-made, a rubbish heap in Ruanda home to trees, birds and human beings that is the (visual) consequence of colonialism, mineral extraction and globalization. (jl)

Araya

Over dazzling images of a barren landscape of rock surrounded by the ocean swell, the opening voiceover describes how salt is born from the marriage of sea and sun. The mineral has been the main source of wealth on Venezuela’s Araya peninsula since the start of the colonial era and is still being extracted with little more than shovels and wheelbarrows in the late 50s: timeless, ritualized “gestures of salt” that produce great pyramids of glistening crystal and actively shape the bodies of the people performing them. Margot Benacerraf’s lyrical documentary contrasts the beauty of the natural setting with the many hardships that go hand in hand with it, also capturing a uniquely direct, if highly ambivalent connection between the mineral and the human just before it is severed forever. Will the arrival of machines destroy a way of life or alleviate it? (jl)