“The huge spiritual world that music produces in itself ends up overcoming material poverty.” These words, or variations on them, by El Sistema’s founder, José Antonio Abreu, are repeated reverently in countless media portrayals of the world-famous Venezuelan music program, including a series of propagandistic documentaries that began with Tocar y Luchar (2006). At last, though, there is a film that puts them to the test: the remarkable Children of Las Brisas (2022), which, in its subtle exploration of the complexity and ambiguity of El Sistema in particular and the power of music more broadly, puts all its predecessors in the shade. This is not an El Sistema film, said its producer at the premiere in London; yet it gives far more insight into the program than the films that tackle the subject head on.
Despite the producer’s disclaimer, the first half of the film follows the established El Sistema documentary template fairly closely. Three talented young musicians are rising steadily up through the ranks of the program. They declare their love for music in moving terms. We meet their families, learn about their domestic dramas, see daily life in their low-income neighbourhood of Las Brisas, and peer inside the El Sistema music school in Valencia that has become a central point in their lives. We share their triumphs: Dissandra makes it into the National Children’s Orchestra and travels to Salzburg to play under Simon Rattle; Wuilly joins the Caracas Youth Orchestra, another prestigious ensemble. Abreu makes his usual oratorical appearance, sermonizing about the power of music, and the students’ experiences seem to bear out his vision. The film is too well made to fall into cliché, but its first part will feel familiar to anyone acquainted with media portrayals of El Sistema.
But then everything changes. The heroes’ journey is rudely interrupted: all three fail a crucial audition in Caracas. They are suddenly out in the cold; the dream of an El Sistema salary has vanished. Wuilly is forced to busk in the capital in order to survive; for a while he even has to live on the street. Dissandra plays background music in a restaurant, but this is not enough to make ends meet. She emigrates to Peru, where she too (barely) survives by busking. Edixon, under intense financial pressure like the others, decides to join the army – clearly a painful choice, given his dislike of the Venezuelan government. Having started down a familiar path, the film makers kept going when the story took a darker turn. They did not set out to critique El Sistema, but reality did that for them.
Children of Las Brisas is a moving story of individual and collective struggle, of connection and separation, and it will speak on an emotional level to a wide audience. Most obviously, it is a close-up portrait of the Venezuelan crisis. Yet it is a dense, rich film that operates on multiple planes and also opens up a number of intriguing questions for those with more specialized interests. It is about failure and decline – of a country, and of its most famous cultural symbol. We witness Venezuela, and El Sistema, falling apart. The film interrogates idealistic narratives of music education through the lens of one of its most famous examples. This is not a romanticized story of triumph against adversity, nor of the power of music to change the world. El Sistema does not arrest the country’s decline; indeed, through its incorporation as a propaganda tool it becomes part of the problem. It is unable to provide a lifeline even for the three protagonists, let alone for the country as a whole.
If the film starts with Abreu’s idealistic words about music’s spiritual richness overcoming material poverty, it ends with a dose of cold reality: its protagonists – all of three of whom are talented and have dutifully followed Abreu’s prescription of “work and study” – are struggling to survive economically. Dissandra even wonders out loud whether all those years of single-minded dedication to classical music, of “playing and fighting,” were really worth it. (Tocar y luchar – to play and to fight – is El Sistema’s slogan.) This is unheard of in El Sistema documentaries: doubts over the validity of the program’s mantras. With the protagonists’ classical music dreams in tatters, the film closes with Abreu’s idealistic rhetoric looking equally threadbare.
A crucial element of this story is one that is usually downplayed or ignored in media and advocacy accounts: money. The three students had to break into (or remain in) one of El Sistema’s three “professional” youth orchestras in order to keep going. Failure meant being forced to do something else for a living. The extraordinary thing about El Sistema in its heyday was that it offered a decent salary to a small percentage of its students (the most talented, not the most needy, as access to the salary was via audition), and this salary (or the aspiration to attain it) played an important part in keeping the students motivated and the institutional wheels in motion. In the early days of El Sistema, Abreu lured music students away from other projects and music schools by offering them scholarships. In private, students would joke that El Sistema’s slogan should really be tocar y cobrar – to play and get paid. In other words, the real story of El Sistema was less about the salvational power of art, and more about the program’s unprecedented resources and how they were distributed – a story as much about the power of money as about the power of music.
This angle to the film comes out in fleeting but crucial scenes. To be sure, the students speak lovingly about music itself. But at one point, Edixon shows his mother his viola: “This thing has value. It’s going to bring in real money.” Dissandra’s mother tells her: “Music is your passport to success.” Forget spiritual richness: for these young people and their families, music was an economic or career strategy. Forget changing the world: this was about the promise of social mobility for a few talented individuals. But El Sistema held all the cards. Through his brilliant if dubious financial management, Abreu had created a classical music bubble economy in Venezuela, built on oil revenue (where else in the world were teenage orchestral musicians paid adult salaries?). But his steady monopolization of the Venezuelan music scene had left most of the power with El Sistema and little with its students, breeding a culture of dependency. In the film, all it takes is one failed audition for things to fall apart. Music or the viola couldn’t provide for these students in Venezuela; only El Sistema’s patronage could. Many films have portrayed the inside of the bubble, without recognizing its real nature; Children of Las Brisas shows us life on the outside and then, in quick succession, what happened when the bubble burst.
The words of Dissandra’s mother – “music is your passport to success” – come back to haunt the film, not just because success turns out to be elusive, but also because her daughter’s chances eventually hinge on a passport – a real identity document, not an imagined artistic one. It turns out that for Dissandra, music, without the legal ID, is a passport to nothing. In this film, the ideal is repeatedly overwhelmed by the real.
Much of the film’s interest comes from its implicit questioning of the kinds of heart-warming slogans and aphorisms that underpin El Sistema and the international field it has spawned. One of its most powerful moments issues just such a challenge, though in a way so subtle that it will probably be missed by viewers not well versed in this field. After his musical dreams are nixed by El Sistema’s uncompromising filtering for talent, and with economic necessity pressing down on his family, Edixon joins the army. Or, as the film tells us, he exchanges his viola for a rifle. This is striking enough on its own, but the resonance is all the greater for those who spot its inversion of another El Sistema motto that is famous not just in Venezuela but across Latin America: a child who takes up a musical instrument will never take up a weapon. Perhaps the film’s makers should have made this point explicitly for the uninitiated; but once again, they show that reality is much more complex than Abreu’s famous mottos.
Poignantly, Edixon reasserts his enduring love for his viola near the end of the film, long after he has been cast aside by El Sistema, and as he struggles to make a living outside of music. I recalled something that an El Sistema student told me back in 2010. The program cares little about individuals, he said; they are easily replaceable: “You may love El Sistema, but it doesn’t love you.” On one level, Children of Las Brisas is a story of unrequited love for El Sistema and for music.
At a more everyday level, the film captures well the detail and atmosphere of El Sistema. There is plenty of the camaraderie among students, the space of sociability that the music school provides, the formation of a new “family” there. But there are also glimpses of the authoritarian, male-dominated organization (there are lots of maestros); of the arbitrary, disempowering, intimidating institutional culture (when crucial auditions in Caracas will happen is anyone’s guess, and Wuilly is called to one – in front of twenty teachers – at a single day’s notice); and the survival-of-the-fittest ethos that lies behind the discursive smokescreen of “social inclusion” (students constantly competing against each other in auditions, and little interest paid to the “failures”).
Dissandra and Wuilly both make it into the top echelons of the program, only to be cast out again. And once their star starts to fade, so does their adopted “family.” Despite all the talk about the collective, in El Sistema the students rise on their own and fall on their own. When the going is good, they move to Caracas from their home town, leaving their real and adopted families behind. The highly centralized El Sistema is a case study of music disrupting existing social bonds as it creates new ones. The scenes of camaraderie involving Wuilly will have an edge to them for any viewer familiar with his public falling-out with El Sistema and his fellow musicians shortly afterwards (I also remember well how his former colleagues attacked him mercilessly on social media). In the end, all three protagonists had to go it alone.
The film is not beyond criticism. It is a little too reverent in its treatment of Abreu, following the erroneous tendency to pin the blame for El Sistema’s decline squarely on its appropriation by Chávez, and overlooking Abreu’s complicity. It was Abreu who crafted El Sistema’s “musical populism” to appeal to the ears of Venezuela’s populist presidents. It was Abreu who made overtures to Chávez, not the other way round. In 2014, El Nacional journalist Diego Arroyo Gil described El Sistema’s founder as a serial flatterer of political leaders who often appeared at their side, “smiling, like Caesar’s special guest.” Abreu was no one’s victim. Political collaboration was his modus operandi, and El Sistema’s reduction to an outright tool of political propaganda was a consequence of his Faustian pact.
In its eagerness to criticize the Venezuelan government, the film underplays not only Abreu’s flaws but also those of his program. After all, it was El Sistema’s Darwinism that provided the turning point in the protagonists’ musical lives. The program’s problematic features (such as authoritarianism, arbitrariness, opacity, gender bias, and sexual harassment) are legion and increasingly well documented. What’s more, they have been in El Sistema’s DNA since the start, to judge from interviews that I carried out with older musicians in Venezuela; some were noted by external evaluators in the late 1990s, before Chávez came to power; so they cannot be laid at the door of the Bolivarian Revolution. The notion of El Sistema as an exemplary program until Chávez came along and ruined it is a popular one in Venezuela, but it is a fantasy, built on a relentless PR operation and the silencing of critical voices.
(Interestingly, the film’s website is rather more directly critical of El Sistema than the film itself: “the impoverished families were sold a social narrative with no conclusion. Education was prioritised over subsequent employment or even basic needs, flooding a society with thousands of violinists at a time when it was struggling to feed its children.” Perhaps such critiques ended up on the cutting-room floor.)
Nevertheless, these are minor quibbles about an otherwise exceptional documentary. Much more important are the larger questions that it poses. It is reminiscent of the classic documentary Hoop Dreams – another film that is about much more than its ostensible subject (in this case, basketball). It focuses on the shadow of failure hovering even over the talented in highly competitive worlds like sport and classical music. These kinds of stories are very rarely told; most writers and film-makers just pluck out a few exceptional cases and create musical inspiration porn. Yet these stories may reflect the experiences of the majority. Hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan children have grown up dreaming of being Dudamel, but how many Dudamels are there today? And how many Dissandras, Edixons, and Wuillys, busking on foreign street corners or forced to abandon their musical ambitions altogether? If Hoop Dreams exposed the faultlines and the elusiveness of the American Dream, Children of Las Brisas does the same – beautifully, if painfully – for El Sistema’s Venezuelan Dream.
For screenings in London on Monday 22nd and Wednesday 24th August, visit: https://dochouse.org/cinema/screenings/children-las-brisas-qa
Geoff Baker 
I actually ended up hating this documentary because the producers used these kids to make money out of it. Yet, the producers left Dissandra on the streets of Peru, where the Peruvian maphias steal Venezuelan kids’ dreams by stealing their passports upon entering Peru. The last scene Dissandra appears she looks older, hurt, grown, her innocence lost. However, you did not seek help for her through organizations that may have rescued her from the streets of an unforgiving Peru. Shame on you! Shame on you who left her to her own peril without any support. Why? Why? Why?
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