Simón has been in theaters for less than a month and has become the highest-grossing Venezuelan film of 2023. It is the story of a student leader who seeks political asylum in the United States while dealing with his traumas after being imprisoned during the 2017 anti-government protests and tortured in a Venezuelan prison. The film was released with the bittersweet surprise that it was not censored. “In Venezuela, it is news that a film has not been censored,” warns director Diego Vicentini (Caracas, 1994) wryly in a video call from Panama, the tenth stop on a promotional tour through the region where he believes he has been converted the cinemas. of cinema in a therapeutic space with his first feature film.
The film continues to enjoy popularity as anthropology student John Álvarez was finally examined by the coroner, 22 days after his defense denounced that he was tortured. This week it was revealed he had lost vision in his left eye and suffered liver damage from the beating. It happens on screen, but it also happens off screen. “Every day that goes by and this doesn’t change, more people suffer,” says Vicentini. This creates an urgency for the filmmaker, who is not even 30 years old, to tell a wound that is still open for a large part of Venezuelans. During these days of repression and chaos by the security forces, more than 150 people were murdered and thousands were arrested.
“It’s hard to see in every city and every country the collective wound that we have and how each person tells their story and how they connect with Simón. It hurts to see how universal the pain they have caused us is. And it was also a shared therapeutic space. “Being 300, 600, a thousand people in a cinema and feeling more or less the same helps us heal,” says the director. The film moved the country externally and internally. This week in Caracas, in an airy room filled with fans because the country’s recurring power fluctuations damaged air conditioning, much of the audience silently wept and applauded before the credits rolled. A few days ago, at the event in Medellín, a Venezuelan told the story of a friend who was killed during the protests and whose parents committed suicide some time later because they had not received justice. “Everywhere I go I find people who have been imprisoned or tortured or who know someone who has.”
In 2009, Vicentini emigrated to the USA with his family. He was barely 15 when he left, and experienced the nearly four months of protests in 2017 through social media while studying film in Los Angeles. “When I woke up I saw on the phone that another child had been murdered and then I had to go to class.” His thesis was the short film that preceded Simón. “The emotional origins of the film lie in the guilt that I wasn’t there. An attempt to contribute. That’s why the film manages to strike a balance between guilt and forgiveness, the ability to forgive ourselves for what we haven’t achieved.”
The character Simón also lives with this duality. He led a student protest group inspired by other social movements around the world that have led to political change. He built it through interviews with several imprisoned and tortured student leaders, including one named Simón, whose testimony he reached via DM on Instagram. His mother wrote to him after watching the short film and told him that her son had gone through the same thing and that his name was Simón. He then met her in Miami, where the director accompanied him to his asylum procedure. “Simón was one of those leaders who was ready to give everything and if he leaves he sees the only option is to forget the country because that is very painful, but this guilt haunts him because he left his team behind. “
The young director believes in the power of cinema to generate empathy and that is what he is looking for with “Simón”, which has already been shown in ten cities in Latin America, the United States and Spain and has been selected for competition by the Venezuelan Film Academy Latin American Film was selected at the Goya Awards. . “A film can radically change the way you think about a situation, and that has already happened to us. In Ecuador, an Ecuadorian stood in the room and said: “On behalf of all of Ecuador, I would like to apologize to all Venezuelans if we have treated them badly, judged them and shown them no compassion.” You feel that we are achieving something. And that’s where this urgency comes from. This happens in real time. The Venezuelans continue to leave, they continue to torture. I want this to end now.”
Fear in the room
Simón premiered in July during the Venezuelan Film Festival in the Venezuelan Andean city of Mérida. This appointment prompted Vicentini to return to the country thirteen years after his departure. He entered through the Cúcuta border; He wanted to remain unnoticed. As he sat in the room watching what he denounced in his film, he sweated coldly. He was afraid, he says.
When he went through the procedures at the country’s film authorities, he received the film’s certificate of nationality with a rather ominous remark. They gave it registration, but the document warned that the film violated the law against hatred and peaceful coexistence in Article 20 and could attract penalties ranging from 10 to 20 years in prison. The hate law, deemed unconstitutional by human rights organizations, was a consequence of the cycle of protests that Simón began, a tool with which the government of Nicolás Maduro punished criticism. “We took it as an observation and moved on. But we took it as a warning.”
The film won the most awards at that festival, including Best Film, Best Screenplay and Best Director, and Vicentini was forced to leave early due to advice he received while in the country. He remembers his return to Venezuela: “I found a country completely stricken and time seemed to stand still, even if people wanted to carry on day by day. People have buried what happened because when you wake up every day and think about it, about all the injustices, it becomes incomprehensible and paralyzing. The film brings out everything we didn’t want to think about, but the best thing for me is that it all comes with a thank you. Even if it hurts, everyone appreciates being visible.”
The fact that the government allowed the screening of a frontal film like “Simón”, while others like “Infection”, a zombie story in the Venezuelan context, were already censored and the media was also blocked, has led to debates. “In Venezuela it is news that a film was not censored,” says Vicentini. “There is a lot of fear here. It’s the uncertainty they wanted to create because they don’t know what can happen to you. I can make this film and this super visible complaint and all of a sudden nothing happens, but a kid goes and tweets and they arrest him and torture him. They interview me on the radio and tell me the words I shouldn’t say so they don’t close the station the next day. That’s the kind of fear they’ve sown, and that leads to self-censorship, to people choosing not to do anything because you never know what can happen.”
There are those who have dared to point out that their forecast was valid since it could be seen as a story of failure for those seeking a change of government in Venezuela. Vicentini assures that the government does not care about allegations at the national level that human rights are being violated, which is known. But at the international level it is beginning to worry him, and that is why this week he reported on his social networks about irregularities in the selection of the Venezuelan candidate for a nomination in the foreign film category at the Oscars. Simón was excluded and “The Shadow of the Sun” by Miguel Ángel Ferrer was selected in a vote in which one of the members was part of the selected production, Vicentini said.
Simón does not include the leaders of the toughest years of Venezuela’s long political conflict. There’s a reason for the decision to make a film that speaks directly to what’s happened in Venezuela since the scars of the 2017 protests, but it’s still timeless. “There are several generations of young people who are isolated and abandoned by the left and the right, disappointed by the opposition and the ruling party alike, and who have completely upended the struggle for the liberation of an entire country because of their Putting the future at risk.” Simón represents those children who would like not to have to fight.”
Orange juice and torture
“Relax, dad,” the guard says sarcastically to one of the five young people hanging by their arms in one of the Venezuelan police torture rooms denounced by United Nations reports and journalistic investigations, which Vicentini recreated in an abandoned building in South Florida . where a project to build rockets for NASA failed to materialize in the 1960s.
At this location are Simón and other detainees, including a young man who was grabbed by the police on his way to work and encountered a student demonstration, another who was simply tweeting, and one who was later shot with a pair of tweezers Tooth pulled that he lost a game of dominoes that the guards forced him and the protagonist’s best friend to play.
One of Simón’s memories of this place is when one of the guards enters the cell and pours out a liquid from an oil container. The prisoners panic, thinking it is fuel they could use to light a fire or urine. They calm down when they realize that it is orange juice, not realizing that they are being eaten by the plague of beetles at night, attracted by this smell.
The director developed an independent project with a very low budget, with Jorge Antonio González and Marcel Rasquin as producers, recorded under the strictures and protocols of the pandemic in March 2021. They made it into the team, but not without receiving rejections for fear of appearing in a film like that. “From financiers to actors to technicians, they told us no because they had family in Venezuela and didn’t want to appear in the credits.”
In the end, they were joined by young talents such as Christian McGaffney, who played Simón, and Roberto Jaramillo, content creator and comedian, as well as veteran Venezuelan television actor Franklin Virgüez. They shot in 23 locations in Miami over 29 days, helped in part by the immigrant community that has grown in this American city. They could have shot a scene in a nightclub on the premises of a Venezuelan who offered them. Another recording in a pharmacy, for which they initially had to pay, was eventually recorded for free when the Cuban owner of the place heard the plot of the film. “He told us that this was his contribution against dictatorships.”
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