Luis Arnías

History

Luis Arnías (1982) is a filmmaker from Venezuela who currently lives and works in Boston, Massachusetts. He completed the diploma program at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and in 2020 received his Masters in Film/Video from Bard College. Arenas is current fellow at Film Study Center at Harvard University.

Movies

Puerta a puerta
Director
A film produced with the same amount of care as the package at its centre, Luis Arnías and Jessica Sarah Rinland’s Puerta a Puerta records the preparation of a shipment in the United States and its attendant unboxing in Venezuela.
Terror Has No Shape
Director
At night in Boston, a bodega cat is the only witness when an alien rock lands among the trees in an empty lot. Crude special effects conjure a viscous white humanoid who is stalked by a figure on a motorcycle. Their encounter ends in ritual fire. A burning effigy and a Senegalese call to prayer combine modes of Afro-Venezuelan spiritual resistance from past and future into an ambiguous present.
Malembe
Director of Photography
Through its rhythmic montage and mix of observational and surreal imagery, Malembe forges oblique linkages between the United States and Venezuela, conveying the strange dissociation of being uprooted, of living between places. As a knife cuts through sky, through snow, and through fruit, quasi-ethnographic footage—with its conventional markers of music, food, ritual—joins with home-movie auto-portraiture of a New England winter, communicating a sense of dislocation at once vertiginously queasy and absurdly comic.
Malembe
Director
Through its rhythmic montage and mix of observational and surreal imagery, Malembe forges oblique linkages between the United States and Venezuela, conveying the strange dissociation of being uprooted, of living between places. As a knife cuts through sky, through snow, and through fruit, quasi-ethnographic footage—with its conventional markers of music, food, ritual—joins with home-movie auto-portraiture of a New England winter, communicating a sense of dislocation at once vertiginously queasy and absurdly comic.
Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another
Director of Photography
With an elephant’s tusk as the protagonist, the film meditates on the endless tactility of conservation.
Distancing
Producer
Shot on 16 mm and in color, Distancing documents the logistics and poetics of Miko Revereza’s decision to leave the United States and return to the Philippines.