Juan Bello

JUAN BELLO

Juan Andrés Bello is a documentary researcher and producer who explores the use of archival materials–photos, footage, and textual records–for storytelling purposes. Over the last two decades, his practice has covered a wide range of subjects: architecture, history, cultural heritage, and human rights; both in Latin America and Canada. His portfolio includes independent films, and projects commissioned by A&E, The Biography Channel, and HBO Latin America, as well as digital resources and exhibitions for museums and cultural institutions.

His work has been exhibited at specialized film festivals, including the International Festival of Films on Art / Festival International du Film sur L´Art (FIFA) in Montreal (2009, 2012, and 2013). Villanueva The Devil, his documentary on Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, was selected to be part of A Tale of Two Worlds, an art exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt (MMK) and the Museo of Modern Art in Buenos Aires (2017-2018)

Juan is a member of the Visual Researchers’ Society of Canada, and the Documentary Organization of Canada. He also teaches at the Faculty of Information and Media Studies (FIMS)–University of Western Ontario.
Please visit his website for more information.

Work by Juan:

The Chalatenango Massacres

The Chalatenango Massacres documents the crimes committed by the Salvadoran army and paramilitary groups against peasant communities during the first years of the Civil War (1979-1982). The project was produced in collaboration with the survivors of the massacres, and it was supported by the Canada Council for the Arts (Explore and Create Program), the London Arts Council, and the Sumpul Association. For more information: https://memorial-chalatenango.com/

Road to Las Aradas, the site of the Sumpul Massacre

Maria Celia Mejivar and Rogelio Quintanilla, survivors of The Chalatenango Masscres

The Chalatenango Massacres – Nicolas Rivera
Link to video here

The Chalatenango Massacres – Rosaura Rivera
Link to video here

The Chalatenango Massacres – Preview
Link to video here

Work in progress:

The Telenovela Archives: The Early Years – an Exercise on Visual Archaeology

The project has the structure of an open archive, it is an evolving collection of visual records–knowledge and memories–that will illustrate the huge impact that television, and more specifically serialized fiction, had in the political, social, and cultural history of Latin America during the 1950s and 1960s. It is also a storytelling exercise: it will present the authors, the work that they created, and the circumstances surrounding its production and dissemination, in a way that will allow the audience to identify cause-effect connections, and to understand the ‘telenovela’ phenomenon (the Latin American version of the North American and British soap-operas), in a historical context.

The project is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts (Explore and Create Program), and involves collaboration with archives in the US, Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela, Argentina, and Brazil.

La Mentira (1952), Private Collection

Fidel Castro, 1959, Time-Life Collection–via Getty Images

Jackie Kennedy at La Morita, John F. Kennedy visit to Venezuela, 1961, JFK Presidential Library

Lucecita (1967), Venevisión

Oil Explorers
This documentary project investigates the story of the Southwestern Ontario men who worked on the first oil fields in Venezuela (early 20th century), part of a group of people known in Canadian history as the foreign drillers. I am particularly interested in the images that the oil drillers brought home from their travels. These personal records are some of the earliest images of the oil-age in Venezuela. In the following decades the representation of the country evolved into a conscious
task, systematically performed by the Venezuelan government and international oil corporations. The project is supported by the London Arts Council.