Ventanas (2023), the documentary by Jhon Ciavaldini competing in the IV Festival de Cine INSTAR, reminds me of the following verse by Carlos Augusto Alfonso: “Veo mi guerra desde lejos en viaje teleférico sobre país neutral” (I see my war from afar on a cable car journey over a neutral country). To the narrator/author of Ventanas, living far from Venezuela does not exclude him from his history. It is 2017, Ciavaldini talks on the phone from Buenos Aires with his mother about the crisis affecting his home country, about the dissatisfaction of the people with the government. On social media, he watches videos of citizen protests from that year and also from 2014, recorded by citizens from the windows of their apartments and shared as testimonies of the climate of terror they live in, of the repression with which the military body of the State responds to civilian demonstrations.

Away from his mother, struck by those images that circulate in networks (the windows from which to observe the tragic Venezuelan situation), the filmmaker articulates the documentary as an awareness of his place in that reality, as a return to himself and his condition as a migrant. In addition to a political statement on the degradation and violation of human rights in Venezuela, the film is an expression of a subjectivity lost among the images that bear witness to that reality.

The narrator comments: "It has never happened to me to have my body in one place and my head seven thousand kilometers away. Only those who have emigrated know what this is like. I wonder if I am leading a double life". Later on he stresses: "I only know that it is impossible to leave completely". And a little later he wonders: "Did leaving the country solve my problems or did it generate others that I didn't have before". The film is a record of his anguish as an emigrant facing the recent history of his country, which takes place seven thousand kilometers away and which, paradoxically, he sees passing before his eyes. And it is also the way in which Ciavaldini participates/acts directly, from exile, in that History.

Ventanas ties a family experience to the social sphere, the author's thoughts to the collective memory of the country. That is one of its virtues. The discursive landscape hangs on the filmmaker's voice, immersed in turn in that Venezuela of civic revolts and police violence, where, of course, emigration is another index of the crisis. The decision to use a first-person narrative, based on intimate experience, to address the Venezuelan issue, considerably enriches the film's discourse. Evidently, the perspective of Ventanas - the subjective resonances filtering the political and social facts - distances itself from any hegemonic or propagandistic narrative.

On at least two occasions Nicolás Maduro appears on television. The truth of the narrator is opposed to the truth wielded by the president, who faces the cameras with a child in his arms - his image could not be more prefabricated - while accusing the demonstrators of being mercenaries and fascists. There is no trace of the violence flooding the streets in these television shots. He does not say it exactly, but the narrator knows that the powers-that-be are trying to build a smokescreen. When the recordings shared on social networks are contrasted with Maduro's television interventions, the documentary eloquently exposes the objective violence: the military deployment in the streets and the precariousness of social life in the South American country.

These videos -containers of a social memory that escapes the control of power and its attempts to translate reality according to its ideological interests- are not only evidence of the political cataclysm, but also the certification that social life in Venezuela is largely experienced as pain, fear and death. Juxtaposed with the director's personal anguish, these archives express a human truth that constitutes the fundamental motif of Ventanas.