Miracle Maker

Film by Julio Neri.

Electofrenia (1978), Neri's third political film, requires a critical distance in order to consider the reasons why Venezuelans choose their presidential candidate in the 1978 election. Electofrenia, signifying the chaos of the elections, proposes that many Venezuelans select the candidate who benefits them personally rather than the one who is good for the country at large. Not without irony, the film brings up Venezuela's two decades of peaceful democratic government. If people choose what is good for them, can we call it a democracy?

In Secretaries Day, either you get laid or you get paid.

A Russian emigre prides himself on the way he's molded himself into a real Yankee in the USA, though the world he lives in, New York's Lower East Side in the late 19th century, is almost exclusively populated by other Jewish immigrants. When his wife finally arrives in the New World, however, she has a lot of assimilating to do.

Armada (1977), Julio Neri's first political film, was made at a time in which several Latin American countries –most importantly Argentina and Chile— had seen a turn towards military dictatorships. Neri questions authoritarian regimes through the narrative of a devoted but free-loving daughter, Armada, and her military father. Armada's line of argument departs from the militant films made by New Latin American Cinema directors in the 1960’s. Rather than openly opposing the violent and repressive regimes (represented by the father), Armada establishes a complex relationship in which the daughter is divided between the love towards her father and the love towards her freedom. However, Armada's death at the hands of her violent father clearly condemns the use of violence and is thus a call to action against repressive regimes. As many Super 8 films of the 1970’s and 1980’s, Armada has a synchronized sound track rather than diegetic sound.

Instants in the private family life of Dal Maso, mixed with shots of the urban life around him. Suddenly, the film unexpectedly changes into a fiction

Autorretrato is the mirror the filmmaker uses to look at himself, and through it, at his reality, using the cinematic collage.

Conditioning, claustrophobia, and mechanization lead a city dweller to a progressive mental imbalance, culminating in self-destructive masochism.