The day that maestro José Antonio Abreu died, Dissandra was on a bus heading to Peru. It was March 2018. In Venezuela, where he had learned to play the violin in one of the centers of the National Orchestra System, the institution that the award-winning composer had founded in the 1970s and turned into a reference, they honored him in an emotional funeral and Nicolás Maduro was preparing to be re-elected a couple of months later. The cultural country was shocked. She, alone with her violin in her luggage, began her youth. The dream of being part of a professional orchestra was destroyed by the hardest years of the Venezuelan crisis.
Dissandra, together with Edixon and Wuilly, make up the portrait of the generation of the collapse of the economic and political model of Chavismo. Children of Las Brisas, a documentary film by filmmaker Marianela Maldonado, clarifies what has happened in the country as only everyday life, with its beauty and dark areas, can do. For a decade, the director followed the family intimacy of the three musical children of The system -the national orchestra system-, inhabitants of a neighborhood in Valencia, an industrial city in the central area of Venezuela. After filming at several festivals and premiering on American and French public television, the film has been seen in the country’s movie theaters for a few days without going unnoticed by the box office and critics. The screen shows an open wound that attracts a large part of Venezuelans.
Neither the makers of the film nor the country that has been a spectator and protagonist expected the evolution of this story. In 2009, when Maldonado made the first approaches to him, it was difficult to foresee the dimensions of what was to come, that steamroller that Venezuelans have gone through. The years of greatest hunger and scarcity of food, medicine, money, certainties, peace. Which were also the years of violence, the immense demonstrations against the Government and the tear gas and pellet bombs.
“I had always done fiction and I was looking to write something related to music and I was interested in academic music,” says the filmmaker from the United States, where she ended up like many Venezuelans. “One day I met the core of the Orchestra System in the Las Brisas neighborhood, in Valencia, the city where I was born, and I started talking to them. The first one I spoke to was Dissandra, a very optimistic and happy girl and then with Edixon who was very curious. The neighborhood was a difficult place, with a lot of poverty, with families where there was only one job and no father, but they were very committed to music. That was an interesting contrast to show what happens when you offer quality education.” In those years, the director Gustavo Dudamelflagship of El Sistema, was also successful in the Los Angeles Symphony and was a role model.
Abreu used to say that the immense spiritual wealth that music engenders is capable of overcoming material poverty. In Maldonado’s documentary, in an archival recording, he says it himself. That idea is the pedestal of the so-called musical miracle of El Sistema, an institution that has positioned itself as a factory of musicians, capable of obtaining a Guinness Record for having the largest orchestra in the world by training a million children and adolescents. The story of Dissandra, Edixon and Wuilly is situated at the limits of that promise.
In 2016, the three protagonists of the documentary are adrift when they fail in the auditions to join a professional orchestra, which are in the capital of the country, where they could receive a salary for developing their talent, where they could traveling on the tours with which the world has known El Sistema. It is at that moment, when the young people found themselves in limbo and had to make decisions, almost six years after starting the project, Maldonado began to write the story with the patience of a documentary filmmaker. It is when Dissandra throws herself into the abyss of migration; Edixon joins the Army to support the home he has with his grandmother and his deaf mother; and Wuilly, who then already played 11 instruments and learned the violin on YouTube, starts playing in the street to be able to eat on tips and ends up as a symbol of the 2017 protests, in which he appears in more than one photo with his violin in front of the police tanks and then crying when a guard broke his instrument.
Like many young people who led those protests, Wuilly goes to prison and ends up in exile in the United States, which has allowed him to continue his career. This turn in the young man’s story was one of the great challenges of the production, which was also affected by the difficulties of moving in a country without gasoline, budgeting for a shoot amid hyperinflation and devaluations, and making films in the midst of the immigration drain. Every time they went to film, someone on the crew had already left. But during the demonstrations that the young musician went to, they had some cameras. “We had a film crew filming in the protests, which were Carolina Ríos and María Fernanda Martínez. We also obtained material from the videographers who covered the protests. “We were able to go with a camera to the funeral of the young musician Armando Cañizález—one of the first victims of the repression of the 2017 protests—with whom Wuilly had played and for which he was very affected,” explains producer Luisa De La. Ville. “We sought to follow them in their desires and decisions, to make a portrait that would bring us closer to that feeling,” adds Maldonado.
“What has happened in Venezuela is very complex and reality surpasses anyone,” reflects the director, who insists on clarifying that the film is not a criticism of the musical institution, although in some sectors it has been interpreted that way. “Music of course is a tool for spiritual survival. But music alone cannot save you when there is no electricity, there is no work. We clearly understand the work that El Sistema does in those neighborhoods where there are not even public schools. But today, for example, the center of Las Brisas is closed.” Dissandra, Edixon and Wuilly, however, have retained the music and today, the filmmakers warn, they are in a better situation than when they finished the film. Both Maldonado and De La Ville agree that the production has helped to understand Venezuela and the years under Chavismo that have marked the last 25 years, especially for foreign audiences. For Venezuelans, with documentaries like Children of Las Brisas either Once upon a time Venezuela —in which Maldonado also worked— or films like Simón, which became a phenomenon that even reached Netflix. Cinema begins to do its work of catharsis and memory.
![Photography during the filming of 'Children of the Brisas'](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/v2/SPQQSOYBS5DM7PP3MJZVQN3T7U.jpeg?auth=53b05e38c4585aaa886f2e85b7ce7e94212df7ab1cce4e7ae4a58aea6c6b311f&width=414)
Follow all the information from El PAÍS América in Facebook and xor in our weekly newsletter.
#Dudamel #music #poverty #Venezuela