Trompiz's project has been selected for the Vancouver Film Festival’s newly-launched Business Hub Works-In-Progress Forum For a time, that was Jeissy Trompiz’s answer when his Brazilian filmmaker friend would ask him about Venezuela. Trompiz left Maracaibo, the oil city where he grew up, in 2014 to study filmmaking at the International School of Film and TV in Cuba, just before Venezuela’s economic and political crisis deepened. He later completed a residency in Italy, made short films in Cuba and Indonesia, and settled in the Dominican Republic in 2019, where he now lives and works.
The pandemic and passport renewal problems kept him away from Venezuela for about six years. When he finally returned home, he was confronted with a changed country he had struggled to explain — even to himself. He couldn’t shake the comparison to Cuba, another country in crisis.
Trompiz describes making it as a form of “therapy.” The film is among the projects selected for the Vancouver Film Festival’s newly launched Business Hub Works-In-Progress Forum. There’s a sense of urgency for Trompiz to tell this story — even though he’s already been working on it for four years. He initially shot on the streets with a mobile phone, but his mother worried about his safety.
She had been involved in promoting the opposition movement, had seen friends jailed, been a target of accusations and pushed out of a public job. Local mafias and extortion posed another threat. Just ordinary people, collecting modest salaries, dealing with the pressures of daily life in Venezuela under its government.
Trompiz’s mother features prominently. After he showed her a cut and asked if she wanted to continue, she told him: “If you believe that it will help the political situation in Venezuela in any way, if it at least helps in this process of trying to look for a democracy in Venezuela — do it. Do not be afraid for me.” They also created a plan should anything go wrong.
Caracas is what much of the outside world pictures when it thinks of Venezuela, he told Variety. The arts, he argues, need to rethink their inclusion of other places “because those are different points of view that can create a more complex perception, analytical situation, and narrative.” Afro and Indigenous communities, he says, sit in the “periphery of the periphery.” The country’s rapidly changing political situation has repeatedly forced him to reshape the film. I wanted Maduro out, but not with U.S. intervention, because it won’t be free.” The root of fascism, he says, is still in Caracas.
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