Benacerraf

Margot Benacerraf, a critically acclaimed Venezuelan documentary filmmaker whose hypnotic “Araya,” a visual tone poem chronicling the daily lives of salt workers on an austere peninsula on her country’s coast, shared the critics’ prize at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival, died on Wednesday in Caracas.

Hailed as a major figure of Latin American cinema, Ms. Benacerraf founded Venezuela’s national cinematheque and in 2018 was given the Order of Francisco de Miranda, honoring outstanding merit in the sciences and humanities, by the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro.

But although Ms. Benacerraf was celebrated, she was not prolific.

Influenced by the magic realism of novelists like Gabriel García Márquez and Alejo Carpentier, Ms. Benacerraf captured, in 90 minutes, the sweat and toil of workers amid the towering salt pyramids on the centuries-old mining terrain of the Araya peninsula.

“Benacerraf’s grand style,” he wrote, “captures the drama of subsistence in the face of nature,” adding that “the overwhelming beauty of the wide-open spaces contrasts with the workers’ burdened trudges through them.”