Inventando América

At the geographic center of Caracas stands a mirror-covered tower. It stands out in contrast to other buildings and the lifestyles of its inhabitants. Due to its size, it is visible from almost any point in the city; it is an architectural object that suggests a way of life and can be interpreted in multiple ways. Its panoramic view is schizophrenic; this is not the fault of the tower. The city, in its different times and spaces, is a bit like the people who build it.

In the small town square of the small Andean city of Merida, Venezuela, there is a singular combat between space and time, from which the only way out is by having written a mythical pact between the synchronic and the diachronic; ethnographic cinema knows these contradictions very well, between good form and good content, between seeing and saying, which transforms the qualitative of a gaze into a necessarily quantitative measure. This film is about a square, but it is also about the problems involved in describing spaces that have become sites.

It tells the story of an architect named Fructo Vivas, a communist who builds a church. It tells the irony of a boy who had no toys but as a profession, builds houses for people with money.