Margot Benacerraf

Margot Benacerraf (born August 14, 1926) is a Venezuelan director of Moroccan Jewish descent. Benacerraf was one of the first Latin American filmmakers to study at IDHEC (Institut des hautes études cinématographiques) in Paris.

Margot Benacerraf
Margot Benacerraf
Born
Margot Benacerraf

(1926-08-14) August 14, 1926
Caracas, Venezuela
OccupationDirector

Work

Benacerraf's two best known films, the 1950s documentaries Reverón and Araya, are considered "landmarks of Latin America narrative non-fiction".[1] Reverón illustrates the life of the well-known Venezuelan painter Armando Reverón. Araya portrays the day-to-day work of the workers of the salt mines of Araya, a village in the east of Venezuela.[2] The film was entered into the 1959 Cannes Film Festival,[3] where it shared the Cannes International Critics Prize with Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour.[4]

Benacerraf founded the Nacional Film Library in 1966 and was its director for three years consecutively. She was a member of the board of directors of Ateneo de Caracas, and in 1991, with the help of the writer and patron of the Latin American cinema Gabriel García Márquez, created Latin Fundavisual, the foundation in charge of promoting Latin American audio-visual art in Venezuela.

Awards

She has received several decorations among them National Prize of Cinema (1995), the Order Andrés Bello (in two occasions), the Order Simón Bolivar, Order of the Italian Government, Bernardo O’Higgins Order of the Government of Chile, among others. In February 1987, Ateneo de Caracas inaugurated a movie theater named after her. In 2019, the Venezuelan American Endowment for the Arts (VAEA) awarded Benacerraf the Paez Medal of Art 2019 for her life work.[5]

References
  1. Kelly, Gabrielle; Robson, Cheryl (2014). Celluloid Ceiling: women film directors breaking through. Supernoval Books. p. 380. ISBN 978-0-9566329-0-6.
  2. Julianne Burton (1990). "Benacerraf, Margot (1926-)". In Annette Kuhn (ed.). The Women's Companion to International Film. University of California Press. p. 40. ISBN 978-0-520-08879-5.
  3. "Festival de Cannes: Araya". festival-cannes.com. Archived from the original on 2012-09-15. Retrieved 2009-02-14.
  4. Araya, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Accessed online 2009-11-15.
  5. "MARGOT BENACERRAF is one of the two recipient of VAEA's Paez Medal of Art 2019". VAEA. Retrieved 2020-11-18.


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