Published:  00:00 Thursday - July 02, 2009

Venezuela Film Week kicked-off on July 1 at the National Cinema Centre with the movie House facing the Sea.

Directed by Alberto Arvelo, the 2001 film has won 10 regional and international prizes.

On the foothills of the Andes, a widowed father and son live happily, away from the stifling atmosphere of city life, until a desperate act of violence tears them apart.

It takes the brave intervention of a stranger to reunite them.

Also being screened at the festival are The Archangel’s Feather, The Wedding and Shoot to Kill.

In The Archangel’s Feather a remote village in the Venezuelan Andes in the 1930s is gripped by fear of the country’s ruthless director, who telegraphs harsh edicts and sentences daily.

Each new telegraph brings pain and hopelessness. But when the town’s telegrapher dies, a mysterious man in a white suit arrives to take his place. Suddenly the lives of the villagers change for the better as the telegraphs take on a progressive tone.

What seems impossible becomes possible in this magical adaptation of a story by the great Venezuelan writer Juan Carlos Gene Cesar Sierra Arturo Uslar Pietri.

Shoot to Kill is based on the real story of a young man who is murdered in front of his mother during a routine police round-up.

The police proclaim the victim a criminal, but the mother launches a long campaign to clear her son’s name. The film was directed by Carlos Azprua, who was awarded the National Film Prize of Venezuela in 2006.