Venezuelan documentary ‘Puedo hablar/May I Speak?’ to be shown on March 4

March 3, 2008

The film “Puedo Hablar?/May I Speak?” will be shown at 7:30 p.m. on March 4 in the Reitz Union Cinema. The film and photo exhibit will be introduced by the film’s director, Chris Moore.

Moore has arranged more than 50 screenings of the film at major colleges and universities across the country and overseas. These screenings have taken him from Harvard and Yale to the universities of Wisconsin and Iowa, and even as far as Oxford and Cambridge.

Moore graduated from Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., in the spring of 2006. At this time, he formed an independent documentary film production company, Sol Productions, with two fellow Trinity graduates. Over the last year, he produced and directed two major documentary films, “Puedo Hablar?/May I Speak?,” the film on Venezuela, and “Democracy in Dakar,” which chronicles the role of hip-hop music in Senegalese politics.

He spent two months in Venezuela filming “Puedo Hablar?/May I Speak?” following both candidates as they raced towards the Dec. 3 elections. The film offers its audience a snapshot portrait of a Venezuelan society at a crossroads—a re-elected president, challenged by a reformed and mounting opposition and a valuable starting block for any debate on current Venezuelan politics. His team journeyed to six different regions of Venezuela, shooting everywhere from the notorious barrios of Caracas to the oil-rich Lake Maracaibo, from a city of 5 million to an Amazonian pueblo of 23, crossing the country in everything from Chavista motocicletas to dug-out canoes and a private jet.

The trailer for the film is available online: www.sol-productions.org