by PABLO NAVARETTE and BENJAMIN DANGL
Pablo Navarrete is a British-Chilean journalist, researcher, editor and documentary filmmaker. Inside the Revolution: A Journey Into the Heart of Venezuela is his first feature length documentary, and was released in August 2009 by Alborada Films. Navarrete was the Venezuela researcher for John Pilger’s documentary The War on Democracy. He is the Latin America editor for Red Pepper magazine and a PhD student at Bradford University in the UK, researching the political economy of development policy under the Chavez government in Venezuela. He has covered contemporary Latin American political issues for the Transnational Institute, Al Jazeera English, The Guardian Unlimited and The New Statesman.
In this interview Navarrete talks about what led him to produce Inside the Revolution, the focus and impact of the film, and describes the Bolivarian revolution’s democracy from below.
Benjamin Dangl: Could you please explain the general focus of your documentary?
Pablo Navarrete: My documentary, which was filmed in November 2008 (just ahead of the 10th anniversary of Chávez’s first presidential election victory) focuses on trying to understand Venezuela’s ‘Bolivarian’ process, as that: a process, and one that is rooted in the specificities of Venezuelan and Latin American history. Like all processes it is often contradictory, has successes, failures and in Venezuela’s case is characterized by the constant tension and interaction between charismatic leadership and collective agency.
I wanted the film to honestly reflect the views of many of the government’s grassroots supporters, who are routinely ignored by the mainstream media. In this sense I see the film as contributing to a history from below.
I hope the film provides audiences with an alternative narrative to the one offered by the mainstream media and challenges what they know about events in Venezuela under Chávez. In my opinion two things are essential to understanding the contemporary political process in Venezuela, and I tried to reflect these in the film.
The first is to move beyond the simplistic interpretations so favored by the mainstream media that focus virtually all developments in Venezuela around the figure of Chávez. Instead, as I already said, I wanted the film to provide a platform for the ignored voices of the government’s grassroots supporters. These people are instrumental in driving the process forward and should be at the center of the story.
Secondly, I wanted the film to provide some basic contextual information about the type of democracy that existed in Venezuela prior to the Chávez presidency. Only then can one better understand the attraction of Chávez’s political program to large sectors of Venezuelan society.
To sum up you could say I wanted to concentrate on the process rather than the individual, without shying away from exploring some of the challenges or concerns that both supporters of the process and analysts generally sympathetic to the process highlighted to me.
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