Enchanted Commons and Politics of Possession:

A Reading of Jorge Thielen Armand’s La Soledad (Venezuela, 2016)

Resumen

In this article, I argue that Jorge Thielen Armand’s La Soledad (Venezuela, 2016), a film shot in cinema-verité style, portrays an ambiguous form of tenancy that destabilizes the conventional idea of private property ownership and stages a conflict between notions of private and common that bear upon the state of housing access in present-day Venezuela. Furthermore, I show how the film articulates this conflict by invoking an imaginary of enchantment entangled with the idea of possession in a spiritual sense (suggesting the presence of an entity within another), and insofar as possession suggests a type of relationship different from property.