
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Irish filmmakers Kim Bartley and Donnacha O'Briain arrive in Caracas in 2002 to make a profile of Hugo Chávez, and end up trapped inside the Miraflores Palace when a coup tries to remove him from power. Their cameras keep rolling through the night of April 11, catching Chávez's inner circle as gunfire breaks out downtown, opposition media declares him finished, and army officers move to take the palace. The crew stays with loyalist ministers and soldiers as the building empties around them, then documents the crowds of Chávez supporters who surround Miraflores two days later and force his return. Venezuelan television coverage from the same days runs alongside the filmmakers' own footage, showing how state and private channels framed the same events in opposite ways, cutting the president's supporters entirely out of the picture at the moment they were retaking the streets. The film's access is the story: a small crew happened to be inside the one room where the coup's outcome was actually being decided.