Lenfest Film: Faculty Spotlight - Araya

Friday, October 2, 2026 @ 7:00pm
Lenfest Center for the Arts, Columbia University, New York

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Faculty Spotlight series returns this fall! This series invites School of the Arts faculty to bring the films and stories they love to life on the big screen. This season, our lineup of movies live on the cusp, capturing the moment when an old way of life gives way to something unfamiliar and new.

The season opens with Araya (1959), a documentary following three families of salineros across Venezuela’s Araya peninsula, presented by Associate Professor Elizabeth Ramírez-Soto.  We continue with Professor Maureen A. Ryan and Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985), a dystopian comedy about one man's unraveling grip on reality as he battles an oppressive bureaucracy. We close in November as Professor Andy Bienen presents The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), a film about three WWII veterans who return from war to find that the hometown they left has moved on without them.

On October 2nd, Professor Ramírez-Soto kicks off our season with a celebration of the centennial of one of Latin America’s foremost directors and promoters of film culture: the Venezuelan filmmaker Margot Benacerraf (1926–2024). To honor the legacy of this foundational figure, whose passion for cinema was ignited during her time at Columbia University, we will screen a 35mm print of her debut feature film, Araya. When Benacerraf arrived at the salt marshes of the Araya peninsula with just her cameraman, she said it was like "landing on the moon." And she had come just in time: mechanization would displace the salineros' centuries-old manual methods the very year she filmed them. Her essay film stands as a witness to lives captured just before everything changed.

Film Free

Schedule & Tickets

Friday, October 2, 2026 @ 7:00pm · tickets local_activity · add to calendar today 2026-10-02 19:00:00 2026-10-02 22:00:00 America/New_York Lenfest Film: Faculty Spotlight - Araya https://harlemonestop.com/event/35276/lenfest-film-faculty-spotlight-araya Lenfest Center for the Arts, Columbia University, 615 West 129th Street, Enter on W 125th Street, New York, NY, 10027