Diego Rísquez

Reel 21 of Gérard Courant’s on-going Cinematon series.

Salserín, la primera vez, candidly recounts a story of teenage love framed in the genesis of a salsa band that was once a musical phenomenon in the mid-nineties.

Tierna es la Noche is a film without bullets nor sea, without mosquitoes, without peasants nor flowers. It only contains a barman, a man and a beautiful woman who lives in a bathroom. For commercial reasons, we have included two policemen, a drop of blood and a multilingual nymphomaniac. For aesthetic reasons, a tear and a black man. For both reasons, the film takes place anachronically, during the fifties and nineties in a make-believe city called Caracas. It's a story of histerics, like all stories, unfinished.

In the wake of a banking crisis, four middle class friends throw a 'white glove' hold up, only to find out that their bank has already gone bankrupt.

Ten years after General Antonio José de Sucre - Grand Marshal of Ayacucho- was murdered in the Berruecos jungle, Colombia. The inquiry into his death is reopened, Captain Alejandro Godoy take charge as prosecutor. Several political motives mean that the case must definitively be drawn to a close. Godoy discovers that a large part of the documentation produced during the original inquiry has been destroyed. With his own life in danger, Godoy discovers a highly intricate plot that put an end to Sucre's life.

Film by Julio Neri.

Beginning with his childhood and covering the many facets that characterized his intellectual universe, this documentary details the different aspects of the most important venezuelan writer of the 60s, 70s and 80s: José Ignacio Cabrujas.

An homage to the painter Armando Reveron, this is the story of a contemporary painter who chooses to live in isolation in a hut alongside the Caribbean Sea. Along with Claudia, his muse, he works using nature as his source of inspiration. Alfredo, a friend and art connoisseur, forces the painter to create a series of paintings for an exhibition in New York that aims at achieving fame and putting him on the contemporary art market. The film presents a tropical perspective of the dilemma between artist and the commercializing of his work.

A hazardous encounter leads América and Juan Pedro to recognize in each other the unsuspicious emotion of the first love. Young and innocent identified with their artistic devotion -he is a composer, she a dancer- they overstep the bound of their shared feeling, joyful and without great fears. They never imagined that their openhearted and pure love could hide a stain: that of racial prejudice.

This is the first of Diego Risquez’ trilogy of avant-garde cinematic treatments of historical subjects. Using a painterly style, it features portraits, still lifes, and scenes shot as tableaux vivants, the film provides an experimental interpretation of the arrival of the Spanish and their domination of the New World, as well as the Venezuelan Independence movement, focusing on the role of Simón Bolívar. There is no dialogue or narration, simply a musical score and the depiction of events from Bolívar’s career.

"Hijos de la tierra" presents a drama set a little before the 1920s, in which scattered news, stories and rumors spread the presence of a new wealth, oil, leading to the suspicion that a great change was about to take place.

Eleven-year-old petty criminal Maroa lives with her violent grandmother Brigida in Caracas. After her boyfriend Carlos is involved in a shooting, Maroa is arrested and sent to a school where Joaquin conducts the youth orchestra, and he asks the naturally talented Maroa to join. Days now revolve around the classes that Joaquin, the shy and unconventional teacher, gives her. He is immediately interested in this talented young girl, who lacks all notion of discipline. Joaquin, the only person to offer hope in the midst of her rejection, finds that through Maroa, his world has also changed forever.

The Orinoko: main character in the film. The first part is set during the pre-conquest and is represented as an earthly paradise. A shaman has precognitive visions: go to Columbus and the Catholic missionary in 1498.

Willi premieres his own reality show and the first guest is the famous telenovela actress, Elsy Ferrer.. It immediately captivates the public with absurd and hilarious situations inspired by the routines of the most celebrated hosts of Latin American television.

The film follows the rise to fame of venezuelan singer Felipe Pirela. From the beginnings when he worked alongside Billo Frometa and his band Billo's Caracas Boys to the days of his death at the hands of a drug dealer.

In 1856, a whaler arrives in Paita, Peru; on board is Herman Melville, who is astonished to learn that Manuela Sáenz, for eight years the lover of Simón Bolívar, is still alive. He calls on her, and although she will not talk to him about her life, his visit sends her to her chest of Bolívar's letters. As she reads them, the sepia-toned present gives way to flashbacks in color: she meets 'the Liberator' in 1822, becomes his lover, and also becomes a colonel in his military movement to realize the 'Gran Colombia', one nation across South America. As plague (brought by the ship) closes in on Manuela's household, so does her tempestuous story move toward Bolívar's betrayal and death.

It is a love story that takes place between 1924 and 1954 on the shore of the Caribbean Seawhere we discover the universe of the great Venezuelan artist Armando Reveron, his relationship with his muse Juanita and inseparable companion, the friends who frequent the building andrecreation of the objects that make up his world, his obsession with tropical light that blinds. We will see the development of his mental illness and the universe playful, emotional and painful inthis magical space called The Castillete.

This low-budget avant garde feature uses no dialogue in telling the story of the reaction of the Spanish court after the initial exploration of America. A botanist revels in his collection of new plants. A native is baptized in a church ceremony, and nuns and court jesters appear throughout this rambling feature.

In 1750, in the glare of the Caribbean, the man who created history known as the forerunner of independence in Venezuela. His name is Francisco de Miranda and, to be exact, is the largest globetrotter who has known the Americas, Miranda has a reputation as an inveterate wanderer, an eternal conspirator, a turncoat, a conqueror of nobles and courtiers, a lover of asylums, libraries, prisons and brothels, has written 63 volumes of his autobiography, a friend of princes, military and world-renowned artists, collector of women and unthinkable dreams, restless fugitive, owner of ten different names, and presented by the British press the moment as the future liberator of Spanish America.

This is tragic comedy about how Candide was brought up in the best of all possible worlds, and how he was expelled from it; how he lost his beloved Beatrice and his master Azcarate; passing through existential storms and shipwrecks; of faith and encounters with the miseries of the universe; and how Candide wanted, at all times, that this was the last day of the world

A thesis on the history, the successes and failures of Venezuelan and Latin American cinema as a whole; demonstrating how little interaction there is between Ibero-American cinema

Short film by Diego Rísquez.