Crítica "El Cine Soy Yo" en Ingles

Luis Armando Roche interviewed by Lorena Pino during the launch campaign of Yotama se va volando, November 2003, Trasnocho Cultural, Caracas.

Image Courtesy: Marie Françoise Roche.

After completing several documentaries, Luis Armando Roche finished his debut feature film as a director, El cine soy yo (1977, Venezuela/France) and as a co-writer alongside Fabrice Hèlion. Roche built the narrative around Jacinto (Asdrúbal Meléndez), a hard-working man full of energy and ideas who could do anything to make a living. One day, he is selling medicinal herbs on a street stall, and the next he is a street photographer, a poet, a musician, a mechanic working in a garage… even a police officer; but above all, he is a dreamer, and in his own way a romantic ‘Don Juan’ looking for adventure. Jacinto has the ability to re-invent himself according to the circumstances.   

During my own adventure in England, I have become a little like Jacinto, teaching Spanish in many schools, working in a factory, in a shop, in a restaurant, on a dairy farm. I have taught the police, I have cooked and sold arepas, sung in a choir, I have volunteered for different causes, I have been back to university, become a mother for the second time and I have shown films in my community and beyond!

In El cine soy yo, Jacinto visits the cinema feeling tired after a day’s work. He walks into the darkened room, smoking, reflective, and immersed in his thoughts. The film has already started. He needs to find a seat; he makes his way past people passionately kissing each other, eating, laughing. On screen there is a documentary about the exploitation of remote diamond villages in Venezuela, describing the diggers who are always on the move looking for their fortune, but far from receiving any profits from their labour, they just help to maintain a cycle of exploitation based on the irony of poverty, despite the richness of the natural resources of their land.

Suddenly, the cinema room has transformed into a place where Jacinto understands the world around him, feeling the urgency to leave everything behind: “Yo necesito un cambio de ambiente, me siento como encarcelado” - “I need a change, it’s like a jail this city”. Reflects Jacinto, while also thinking about the isolation and lack of entertainment around the miners’ villages,  “How could movies reach those places?”

Jacinto thinks of these people from far away areas that have probably never seen a film, wondering about how he could take all the equipment that is needed to tour the country showing moving images.

Jacinto is going through a mystical process. To be a film projectionist is his new attempt at being successful in life, something that connects him with the practice of the first film businessmen who were producers, distributors and exhibitors travelling with a big camera/projector around towns offering people their very first cinema experiences. Now in the 1970s Jacinto wants to travel taking cinema to the communities. However, this is not perceived as something primitive, it feels like a modern way to move forward. “You failed as a business because you didn’t take the cinema to the streets.” Says Jacinto to a worker of an abandoned cinema. “Nowadays, movies must go to the people, the television goes into their homes, the success is based on imagination.” I perceive his observation as a very revolutionary idea from our perspective today, where cinemas have to consider the challenges that come with streaming platforms.

In those analogue years, Jacinto transformed an old truck, got a loan and after collecting the equipment and big film reels, he left Caracas on a round-trip adventure across the country; from the capital to rural towns, crossing rivers, plains, the Andes, in a very descriptive journey which shows the exotic landscape, different ways of living, the blue Caribbean Sea, the lively Afro-Caribbean traditions in coastal towns and the oil pumping units and oil platforms as a reminder that Venezuela is also a major petroleum producer. Jacinto’s character is like a religious missionary spreading the word and the light that is film to an unexplored land.

Screenshot: El cine soy yo. The red whale-shaped truck leaving Caracas.

The different communities enjoy getting together in public spaces, in open-air cinemas, and Jacinto knows instinctively how to get people involved in the whole film event. Almost fifty years later, we are talking about the importance of “eventualizing” film screenings to make them more appealing to audiences.

Still: El cine soy yo, Jacinto projecting films.

Jacinto is not alone on this trip! He soon has the company of Manuel (Alvaro Roche), an  eleven-year-old orphan who offers to help with the projections; and Juliet (Juliet Bertó), a mysterious French woman who is also looking for adventure. They are like an improvised family showing films and trying to enjoy themselves on their journey. There is a feeling of pleasure relatable to childhood, innocence and honesty in these characters and a search for freedom. Although this is a journey with its own difficulties and challenges, some of the attitudes expressed by the characters about gender roles and sexuality are contentious but reminiscent of that time.

Still: El cine soy yo, Juliet Berto, Alvaro Roche and Asdrúbal Meléndez.

El cine soy yo is a very evocative film, universal in the description of those free-spirited souls, that love a journey and the film experience, which is explored at different levels, including fragments of Mexican films and previous short films by Roche, and even a film crew in the middle of a production appears inside the film with a cameo of Luis Armando Roche.

A film crew inside the plot of El cine soy yo, bottom right: Luis Armando Roche.

For Venezuelans, this film can offer a connection with childhood memories, with those family holidays around the country exploring our warm, salty beaches, the areas of rainforest, the Andean paramos. How much have we changed? Jacinto remembers his childhood, the cow’s milk and the games. I remember my own head under the cold water as Manuel plays in the mini waterfalls in the rivers, and I see myself travelling and dreaming about the future in the back seat of that classic white Dodge Dart that belonged to my dad in the 70s.

Screenshot: El cine soy yo. Manuel playing in the river.

The new 4K restoration of El cine soy yo was carried out by Bolivar Films Laboratories in 2024. The UK premiere will be at Cinema Rediscovered on Sunday 28 July 2024 at Watershed, Bristol. The film is available to UK venues for bookings after the festival. This is only possible thanks to Other Ways of Seeing, with the support of the BFI and National Lottery funds. With special thanks to Bolivar Films and Marie Françoise Roche.