INTERVIEW: Telling Venezuela’s story through the prism of one family in ‘La Soledad’

The headlines in Venezuela grow more dire by the day. The South American country has struggled with an economic crisis that has left families facing difficult futures. First-time director Jorge Thielen Armand knows the tribulations of the country all too well. He emigrated from Venezuela to Toronto, but he still desires to return to the place of his birth.

To address some of his personal issues and offer commentary on the current crisis, Thielen Armand spearheaded his first feature film, La Soledad, which is set to play the 34th edition of the Miami International Film Festival March 3-12. The movie will also play the Cartagena Film Festival, March 1-6, in Colombia.

La Soledad is an interesting mixture of fact and fiction — part documentary, part dramatic narrative. The film tells the story of a family living in Venezuela and facing desperate poverty. Jobs are hard to come by for José (José Dolores López), the main character. His wife talks of moving to Cali, Colombia, but José believes the problems will follow them, especially because his grandmother is in need of urgent medical care and prescription drugs. When José looks into the face of his daughter, he sees so many opportunities missing from her life. They can’t even find the time to go swimming at the beach.

To survive, and possibly thrive, Jorgé searches the estate where they are currently living. His quest is to find the legendary stockpile of gold that’s rumored to be buried on the property. As he searches and searches with a metal detector, the family loses its claim to the house. The original property owners, who once employed Jorgé’s grandmother, want to sell the land, and that means the family must move out.

The story for the movie mirrors Thielen Armand’s actual life.

“The idea for the film came about when I heard that my family was going to get rid of the house, and I knew that my friend, José, whom I know since I was a child, was living there,” the director said in a recent phone interview. “So I went back to Venezuela, where I’m from, and asked my father to take me to the house. So we visited the house, and I saw my friend José after 15 years of not having seen him. I didn’t really know him as an adult, and I proposed that we make a film together.”

They made a demo about the house and shopped the video around to possible financiers. Thielen Armand ultimate goal was to tell a story exploring why his family stopped using the house in the first place. The director’s childhood memories include many visits to the estate, especially on Sundays with his cousins and uncles. They would have lunch and use his great-grandmother’s house as a gathering point.

“When my great-grandma passed away, we stopped gathering there,” he said. “So the family became more distant, and many of us, including myself, emigrated out of the country. So I wanted to pay homage to this time and to explore my memories in this house.”

The actors are nonprofessionals, so what audiences watch is a quasi-documentary. “In fact, they are the people who are really living in the house and are going through a struggle with my family, so they are real people interpreting versions of themselves,” he said. “The character of Jorgé is my father, and the only one who is not interpreting herself is the grandma, Rosina, because the real grandmother had a brain stroke two weeks before the start of the shoot, so the grandmother you see there is in fact the real aunt of Jorgé.”

The actors didn’t have any expectations about the filmmaking process, and the director guided them through the process. Thielen Armand never gave them a script; they only knew the story on a synopsis level. Right before shooting a scene, he would go over the content and what type of dialogue would be best. He was looking for “spontaneous reactions.”

The toughest part of filming La Soledad, which received acclaim at the Venice Film Festival, was not capturing genuine performances from the cast. Perhaps the most challenging aspect was filming in Venezuela.

“Venezuela is a country that is in a deep economic crisis right now,” Thielen Armand said. “When you’re filming, there’s a constant fear that someone might come and take your camera, so you have to have security. For example, my props guy, he spent an entire afternoon going to a bunch of stores to find regular consumer batteries that we use for the metal detector because we don’t make it in the country, and these are imported. … You have your sound man turning off his mic in every take to save battery, and then he will forget to turn it back on because he’s trying to save battery. You have this camera assistant using every last little bit of tape because tape is really hard to find now.”

Still, Thielen Armand considers Venezuela his home, and he would have the filmmaking process no other way. “It’s my home, and that’s where the stories are close to my heart,” he said. “The landscape is really beautiful and colorful and powerful, so there’s a lot to explore there that has never been filmed before.”

He added: “That’s one of my intentions of making this type of film is to make a film that is like a mirror for the audience rather than just a distraction, a mirror that can later spark more dialogue. The film has only been shown in Venice, so not many Venezuelans have seen it. So I’m really excited for the Miami screening because I know there’s going to be a big Venezuela attendance and to see those reactions. That’s also why I use nonprofessional actors because I thought that was the most honest and accurate way to tell a real story of something that is happening right now in the country. I thought the most honest way to do it was to use real people.”

La Soledad is set up for distribution in Venezuela and will likely be released in June. There are incredible challenges with releasing a film in the country, but Thielen Armand is determined to overcome the obstacles.

Still, in the audience at those screenings will be a small contigent of the director’s family and friends. With each passing day, more people in Thielen Armand’s life leave this country in crisis.

“In fact, 10 of my crew members from making the film have already emigrated from Venezuela,” he said. “We filmed in February of 2016, and every year that goes by more of my friends have left, and I’m talking about people from all social strata now. … Every time I go back I have less and less people that I know, so I’m very afraid of the day that I’ll come back and my family will have passed away. And there will be no one. The dream is to move back one day, but every day that goes by, it seems more and more unrealistic.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

La Soledad will play the Miami International Film Festival (March 3-12) and Cartagena Film Festival (March 1-6). Click here for more information.