Elia Schneider and her gritty cinema

Elia Schneider, at the 2005 Santa Barbara, California festival.Rebecca Sapp / GETTY

A young man moves his arms like a bird while running over the garbage dump that collects all the waste from Caracas. He imitates the vultures that surround him and that, like him, search for carrion among the remains to survive. It is the final scene of Huelepega, the film that Elia Schneider recorded 21 years ago as a manifesto against poverty, inequality and the social crisis from which the so-called street children of pre-Chavista Venezuela were born: the huelepega that throughout Latin America have deceived hunger getting high on glue fumes under some bridge. The picture is seen again among Venezuelans two decades later, with the country plunged into its worst economic debacle, but now without the flamethrower gaze of Schneider, who died on Friday in the city of Los Angeles, in the United States, after fighting for 27 years against liver cancer.

Huelepega is one of the fundamental films of Venezuelan filmography. In his time he fought against government censorship and a society that preferred to look the other way when one of these children was crossed in the street. It was a guerrilla film, shot with cameras inside trucks to prevent the team from being arrested. And it was the highest grossing of 1999. It was made with 15 national and international awards.

To make it, Schneider did what today makes her stand out as an acting teacher. For ten weeks she trained a group of street children who acted in the film. Last year, when it was 20 years old after its premiere, the filmmaker recalled in an interview in the Venezuelan newspaper El Universal what that experience meant. “It was a complex process, but at the same time one of the best experiences I have had. These workshops were adapted to their reality, at first the focus of these boys was to consume drugs and steal from people, during classes and filming they just wanted to dedicate themselves fully to acting ”. On that occasion she also told what had become of them. She did not know anything more about the protagonist, another got a scholarship to finish high school, studied at the university and dedicated herself to teaching theater workshops and had to recognize a third after being murdered in reckoning with a rival gang. “I feel a lot of anger and indignation when I see that the reality of street children in Venezuela did not improve. What worries me the most is that absolutely nothing is being done to remedy it ”, she mentioned.

Married to the Uruguayan-Venezuelan filmmaker José Ramón Novoa, Schneider also made Punto y Raya (2004), based on the friendship of two deserter soldiers, one Colombian and the other Venezuelan, which emerges on the common border - another story with resonance today - for which he obtained 30 international awards at the festivals of Havana, Huelva, Biarritz, Bogotá, Santa Bárbara, Santo Domingo, San Francisco and the Latino of Los Angeles, among others. This was also the first Venezuelan film to compete in the Golden Globes. In 2010 he released Des-authorized , based on his experience in the theater. Her latest film, Tamara (2016), is inspired by the life of Tamara Adrián, a transsexual, lawyer, activist for the rights of women and the LGBTI community and today a member of the National Assembly. He also produced the feature films Agonía (1984), Sicario (1994), Garimpeiros (1999), El Don (2006), Un lugar farjano (2009), Esclavo de Dios and Solo (2013).

"Beyond an impeccable, constant, recognized and profound cinematographic and theatrical work, she leaves a legacy as a director and teacher of actors and a family made up of thousands of people whose lives have changed," she tells EL PAÍS her son Joel Novoa. “These days what surprises me the most is receiving messages from so many corners of the world with the constant change that Elia generated in their lives. It was her solidarity, dedication, energy and dedication that defined her in everything, and as a son I was able to enjoy having her as a mother and counselor and my father as a life partner 43 years ago. It leaves us all with a broken soul ”, adds the new filmmaker who also navigates in the waters of directing in film and television, with participation in series such as Arrow and who recently founded the Latinx Directors platform, to promote the hiring of Latin talent in American industry.

Of indeterminate age, because he always wanted to keep his date of birth a secret, Schneider comes from a family of Holocaust survivors. He studied Psychology at the Andrés Bello Catholic University, trained in dance, theater and classical ballet and began his career in film in the 1980s, while studying at the Institute of Fine Arts and the Tisch School of Arts in New York. At the prestigious Stella Adler acting academy in Los Angeles, she taught the Fundamentals of Theater-Adler technique workshop in Spanish .

The world of Venezuelan culture and cinema has expressed its regret for the death of Schneider. Actor Luis Fernández, who starred in Tamara , wrote on his social networks: “Her extraordinary talent as a director made her bright on the set that I had the privilege of sharing with her and her cinematographic family. In that place of creation that made us infinitely happy, in addition to a great film, an indissoluble and deep bond was created ”. From the critics, Sergio Monsalve added: “Peace to the remains of Elia Schneider, director of Huelepega , one of the most watched films of the nineties, as well as Punto y Raya , Des-authorized and Tamara . A specialist in directing actors. Head of a family of filmmakers. One of the important women of our cinema ”.