Venezuela: Filmmakers Explore Urban Realities  · Global Voices
Laura Vidal

Caracas, in all its fascinating chaos, is an inspiration for several filmmakers. Through their work, these filmmakers underline the aesthetics of urban life in elements that for most people often mean confusion and disorder. Thus, three artists share their work using web 2.0 tools and give netizens inside and outside Venezuela a different perspective of Caracas.
Inspired by Jorgen Leth's short film “The Perfect Human”, “La ciudad perfecta” (The Perfect City) shows different parts and angles of Caracas. The film, created by Sven Methling, Ricardo Bombín, Claudio Cenedese, Ángel Antúnez, Alfredo Castillo and José Ignacio Benitez, was awarded in this year's Biennial of Cadiz.
Another short film, “Transgresiones” (Transgressions), shows how people's paths in the city make an ever-changing landscape. The film includes brief scenes from the daily life of families occupying abandoned private buildings, and underlines how these images become a part of the city's aesthetics.
Focusing on this same social phenomenon, Cylixe shares her work about David's tower, an abandoned building where an important number of people have constructed their homes. The story of this building has long been debated and reported. Cylixe describes the Tower as a “City Within a City”:
[…] When over 20 years ago the construction was interrupted for a skyscraper ion [Sic] Caracas, Venezuela, no one could have guessed, that this building would once become the tallest squat on earth.
An empiric, fractal view in to [Sic] the everyday life, the structure and the thoughts of the habitants [Sic] keeps in dialogue with the architecture of the tower, which once had been conceived as a financial center and now gives shelter to a parallel society.