MOVIE REVIEW: A Gripping Inside Look at Hugo Chávez's Venezuela

Friday, February 27, 2004
(12:00 AM ET)
By Mary Brennan

Special to The Seattle Times

This is a true story more gripping than any fiction.

Populist Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez in "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised."

Image Credit: Courtesy of Power Pictures

ST
Irish filmmakers Kim Bartley and Donnacha O'Briain hold an undisguised affection for charismatic Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez that permeates "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," their taut chronicle of what they describe as "the world's first media coup." There's nothing stylistically distinguished about the film, but it's nonetheless a gripping, nearly perfect documentary, chronicling a heart-stopping rise, fall and triumphant reversal in the space of its 74-minute running time.

The filmmakers were granted full access by Chávez to produce a portrait of the controversial president for European television. As a result, they happened to be on hand in April 2002, when a seeming uprising boiled through the streets of Caracas toward the presidential palace. As gunfire broke out and the goal of the demonstration became all too apparent, they filmed the harrowing progress of the coup from the inside.

Chávez, a lifelong military man, was elected in what's described as a landslide victory, coming into office on the strength of his Bolivarian ideals and his promise to redistribute the country's enormous oil-based wealth, which had remained for centuries in the hands of a power elite. His rhetoric, apparently, was more than just rhetoric. He set out to do what he said he would, and that's where the trouble began.

The filmmakers paint Chávez as a man of the people: He mingles with adoring crowds, accepting tiny notes with scribbled wishes, many of them touchingly modest. "I need a bag of cement," writes one Chávez admirer. A staffer explains that they receive hundreds of such notes a day, and read them all. She opens a door to a room where the preserved bits of paper are stacked endlessly, filling shelf after shelf.

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Dan