Eyes Wide Open: A Journey Through Today's South America

A documentary that proves, as always, that poets make the best revolutionaries

By Brenda Norrell.
Censored News
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Film website and contact info:
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The documentary, Eyes Wide Open -- A Journey Through Today's South America, reveals some of the most censored issues of corporate greed and colonialism, while revealing how governments in South America are rediscovering their lands and reinvisioning their futures.

It is a good primer for those struggling to gain background information on the Wikileaks diplomatic cables, as in why Bolivia's President Evo Morales expelled the US consulate and why Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez is so threatening to the US, as in bringing in Cuban doctors to save the eyesight of the poor in Bolivia. It offers background on the Wikileaks cables, revealing details on why the US spied on Uruguay, Bolivia, Brazil and all the other countries who dared to say 'no' to the US or offered support to those countries who did.

It reveals how Chavez led the movement to say 'no' to free trade policies, in the face of George Bush, and how the Bolivarian Revolution evolved and shook the US.

The film and its makers prove, as always, that poets make the best revolutionaries.

It speaks of the people who were annihilated in the oil fields of the Amazon, with the oil fields now bearing the names of these Indigenous Peoples.

It also shares the voice of the elder who carries the jaguar spirit.

In its final and most poignant piece of poetry, the film reveals that Ecuador, ahead of its time in cutting age Constitutional reform, and the beauty of truth, has recognized the rights of nature.

It is a film that remembers Che, and carries with it the voices and heartsongs of tens of thousands of Indigenous Peoples who were tortured, raped, murdered and disappeared by mining and other multi-national corporations in South America.

These are the stories, the truths, that the US does not want you to hear.

--Censored News

Eyes Wide Open Synopsis


In his 1971 standard work Open Veins in Latin America, Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano describes the centuries of economic exploitation of his part of the world. Almost 40 years later, Uruguayan documentary filmmaker Gonzalo Arijon reevaluates the situation in Eyes Wide Open -- A Journey through Today's South America. His search takes him from the soybean plantations of the Brazilian Amazon and the tin mines of Bolivia to the deep jungles of Ecuador. Arijon, winner of the Joris Ivens Award in 2007 for Stranded, shows how the current crop of leftist leaders in these countries are attempting to resist the squandering of natural resources by large, international companies. The principal culprits he identifies are the neoliberal ideology and the ensuing wave of privatizations. Arijon's politically committed film allows the local populations to speak for themselves, interspersing this with archive footage of speeches by the likes of Hugo Chávez (Venezuela), Lula da Silva (Brazil), and Evo Morales (Bolivia). Galeano himself also talks -- sometimes in poetic language -- about how the rise of socialist governments in the early 21st century is benefitting Latin America, and what more can be done.