Román Chalbaud

Román Chalbaud was born on October 10, 1931 in Mérida, Venezuela. He is a director and writer, known for Pandemonium, la capital del infierno (1997), El pez que fuma (1977) and La quema de Judas (1974).

Works

Los años del miedo

The political leader Alberto Carnevali, secretly returns to his country to plot against the dictatorship of Marcos Perez Jimenez. The Intense subversive struggle brings the torture of many of his comrades.

Release Date1987-10-01

DepartmentProduction

JobExecutive Producer

Charactersd

Crab

Commissioner Leon (Miguel Angel Landa) of the Technical Judicial Police is assigned to the kidnapping of a child of the upper class of Caracas. The details of the kidnapping the attention of Leon, as there is no evidence of violence in the child's home, or witnesses to the abduction. Based on that Leon believes that the hijackers knew the boy and soon begins to suspect several young people from wealthy families of Caracas.

Release Date1982-04-22

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

El caracazo

El Caracazo o Sacudón fue una serie de fuertes protestas y disturbios durante el gobierno de Carlos Andrés Pérez, que comenzó el día 27 de febrero y terminó el día 28 de febrero de 1989 en la ciudad de Caracas, e iniciados realmente en la ciudad de Guarenas, cercana a Caracas. El nombre proviene de Caracas, la ciudad donde acontecieron parte de los hechos, recordando a otro hecho ocurrido en Colombia el 9 de abril de 1948; el Bogotazo. La masacre ocurrió el día 28 de febrero cuando fuerzas de seguridad de la Policía Metropolitana (PM) y Fuerzas Armadas del Ejército y de la Guardia Nacional (GN) salieron a las calles a controlar la situación.

Release Date2005-02-11

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Vote Count4

Manon

During a bus ride through the Andes, two seminarians encounter with a woman named Manon. Immediately, one of them falls in love and the attraction is mutual, so they decide to flee to capital city to start a new life. But the love of Manon ambitious drags this man to leave his vocation and commit criminal acts to maintain a life of luxury and extravagance.

Release Date1986-07-22

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Vote Count1

Young Cain

Juana moves with her son Juan from the country to Caracas in search of better work and educational opportunities. When they get there they have to live in a poor home in one of the slums located in the city's outskirts, where they encounter a horrible world full of promiscuity and misery, that is quite different from what they expected and that eventually will lead Juana to self-destruction and Juan to reconsider his life in the city.

Release Date1959-10-05

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Vote Count4

Light in the High Plains

Life changes for an Andean family when oil wealth and a fugitive arrive in town.

Release Date1953-05-01

DepartmentDirecting

JobAssistant Director

The Burning of Judas

Jesús María Carmona is a small-time crook who poses as a cop so he can rob a bank. A few days before the day he planned to do it, a guerrilla group robs the same bank and Carmona is shot to death defending it when he has no other choice but to act as a policeman. Soon after, his image becomes a symbol for the police and he is honored, but his identity is found out. Meanwhile, in the neighborhood where he grew up his effigy is burned as he is now considered a traitor.

Release Date1974-11-20

DepartmentWriting

JobStory

Vote Count4

Cuchillos de fuego

Version of the play "Todo bicho de uña". It tells the story of revenge. The tour of the Andean, for ten years, a young man in search of the rapist and murderer of his mother, takes us into the underworld strata fairs and circuses villagers.

Release Date1990-04-12

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Vote Count1

Yo, el gobernador

Release Date1965-01-01

DepartmentCrew

JobAdditional Dialogue

Vote Count2

El Corazón de las Tinieblas

Joseph is a sailor who returns to his aunt's home after 14 years at sea, there he will be involved in the process of African colonialism signing a contract to travel to Congo captaining a ship called Florida that is shipwrecked as soon as it reaches Congo forcing them to walk the Congolese forest in the heart of darkness

Release Date1990-06-20

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Ratón en Ferretería

Adonai Flores, an experienced writer of telenovelas, falls in love with Belén Helena, a girl of low class. Adonay, desperate to keep her with him, abandons his responsibilities and even his dog. After discovering that she is a drug dealer he decides to leave her and recovers his dog

Release Date1985-05-01

DepartmentWriting

JobWriter

Vote Count3

The Flock of Angels

Ingrid is a young high school student who due to the impact suffered by the death of his mother, is acting strangely causing concern to her teachers. After a landslide caused by heavy rains, police surrounded the premises of the high school to expel the refugees resulting in the classes suspended.

Release Date1979-07-10

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Vote Count3

La noche del sapo

Venezuelan horror television movie from 1982.

Release Date1982-01-01

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

The Drunken Pussycat

Victor, a family man, becomes romantically involved with Rosario, a young newly arrived prostitute from the city of Maracaibo. His obsessive love and the desire to share his life with this woman, will lead him to despair.

Release Date1983-10-26

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Vote Count1

La Oveja Negra

A group of thieves and outcasts are living in a big abandoned movie theater where they have created a very friendly and very particular universe. The police will use all its resources to violate their space, but again and again fail in their attempts.

Release Date1987-07-23

DepartmentWriting

JobScreenplay

Vote Count2

Chévere o la victoria de Wellington

A young man roams the streets of Caracas.

Release Date1971-03-17

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Bodas de Papel

Esther and Gustavo are celebrating seven years of happy marriage. Two beautiful children and a comfortable home in a residential area backs the stability of the still young couple, a conventional model of marriage where nothing seems to disturb their harmonious coexistence.

Release Date1979-06-13

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Días de poder

The film tells the story of Fernando Quintero (Gustavo Camacho), revolutionary leader who, after the fall of the dictatorship of Marcos Perez Jimenez, ascends to power, betraying their ideals to become an accomplice of repression against whom he fought.

Release Date2011-06-03

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

The Smoking Fish

A handsome young man is released from jail and goes to "El Pez que Fuma", a bordello in the outskirts of Caracas. La Garza, its middle-aged owner, hires the young man as handy man, but soon he takes the place of the administrator, who is also La Garza's lover.

Release Date1977-01-02

DepartmentWriting

JobScreenplay

Vote Count13

Sacred and Obscene

Pedro Zamora (Miguelangel Landa) is a former guerrilla who returns to Caracas and moves to a pension as a tenant. Despite appearances, he has come to fulfill a secret mission to its ultimate consequences.

Release Date1975-07-23

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Pandemonium, the Hell's Capital City

Adonai is an lunatic poet. He lives in an abandoned neighborhood of Caracas where he runs an underground radio called "Radio Pandemonium", he lives with his mom, his grandmother and a young lady who she calls very endearly, 'whore'. They survive among the corrupt, the death and the rising upheaval of the oppressed.

Release Date1997-06-13

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Vote Count2

Carmen

Carmen is a beautiful woman working in a business that is dedicated to smuggling. One day, Carmen fights and hurts to a smuggler woman, so a sergeant in the National Guard, José Navarro, stops detain her. In doing so he also falls in love with her, but jealousy will destroy his passion.

Release Date1978-10-11

DepartmentWriting

JobCo-Writer

Vote Count1

La planta insolente

The film reproduces the historical moment when Cipriano Castro, then president of Venezuela, proclaimed: "The insolent plant of the foreigner has desecrated the sacred soil of the fatherland!" While the coasts were invaded by imperial forces in 1902.

Release Date2017-05-13

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Seis meses de vida

Venezuelan comedy directed by Víctor Urruchúa.

Release Date1951-11-10

DepartmentDirecting

JobAssistant Director

El asesinato de Delgado Chalbaud

In the turbulent Venezuela of the 1950s, ambition and betrayal intertwine in a drama that culminates in a tragic outcome. Rafael Simón Urbina, a man marked by resentment and frustration, hatches a plan to eliminate Carlos Delgado Chalbaud (Raúl Amundaray), the leader of the military junta that rules the country. Driven by a deep hatred for the regime and an unquenchable thirst for power, Urbina orchestrates a daring kidnapping that culminates in a brutal murder.

Release Date1979-01-01

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Tales for Grown Ups

This anthology film consists of three parts: "Story One: The story of the brave man", "Story Two: Angels Rhythm" and "Story Three: The false office of supernumerary". The first story tells of a man desperate to get money to cure the illness of his daughter. The second story tells the adventures of a gang of youths; and finally, the third story tells of corruption in Congress.

Release Date1963-06-19

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Zamora, tierra y hombres libres

Venezuela, the mid-nineteenth century. The polarization between liberals and conservatives marked the political agenda. Inequalities of colonial society kept farmers and slaves under the yoke of the oligarchy. Ezequiel Zamora mobilized by deep ideals of liberty is leading a fight to try to erase social inequalities and distribute land equitably.

Release Date2010-10-01

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

When I Want to Cry, I Don't

In Venezuela, one day in 1948 there were born three children all named Victorino: Pérez, mulatto and son of the poor Lucía; Perdomo, son of a middle-class communist who gets arrested; and bourgeois Peralta. On the day of his eighteenth birthday Pérez escapes from prison using lather pretending it to be a rage attack. Peralta shows a friend of his a car he got from his parents. A young lady gives herself to Perdomo as a birthday present. Pérez finds his mistress with another man and wounds her. Pérez and a few others rob an old man while riding on their motorcycles. Perdomo and a bunch of bushwhackers plan to rob a bank. Pérez sees a friend of his smoking pot while Peralta visits a cousin of his and has sex with her. Perdomo’s father, recently elected a communist representative wants to talk him out of his violent ways. Pérez sleeps with three girls and remembers how he once killed a man in the middle of a robbery. Peralta and his friends shoot dogs just for fun. Perdomo and his pals…

Release Date1973-07-04

DepartmentWriting

JobScreenplay

Vote Count7

Crab II

Commissioner Leon (Miguel Angel Landa) investigates the murder of a woman in a population near the capital. The woman was raped before death and the case is complicated when his brother becomes the prime suspect, since it is a priest (Eduardo Serrano). Because of the implications that inquiries might have, Leon is pressured to keep the event as a "crab" (Cangrejo, or a unsolvable case), but he decides to comply with the law.

Release Date1984-06-13

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Vote Count1

The Assassination of Delgado Chalbaud

The Assassination of Delgado Chalbaud

DepartmentCreator

JobCreator

Cine Invisible

A thesis on the history, the successes and failures of Venezuelan and Latin American cinema as a whole; demonstrating how little interaction there is between Ibero-American cinema

Release Date2023-07-12

Final Absolution: History of a Photograph

During a military uprising known as “El Porteñazo”, a priest is photographed while trying to help a soldier wounded in combat. The photo travels the world and is awarded the most important prizes in photojournalism, such as the Pulitzer Prize and the World Press. Throughout this documentary, photographers, editors and witnesses reveal various aspects surrounding that image: who is the priest, who was its author, the events that surrounded the photographic event, what was its political role and what said image represents in the history of Venezuelan journalism. Additionally, it allows the presentation of other photographs, some unpublished, that Rondón managed to capture in those difficult moments.

Release Date2010-10-07

Una noche oriental

Benito Zamora, a conspirator against the Perezjimenista government, uses Leonor Montes, a young vedette friend of a colonel, to find information. National Security is pursuing Benito to dismantle the plot.

Release Date1986-01-22

Cabrujas en el país del disimulo

Beginning with his childhood and covering the many facets that characterized his intellectual universe, this documentary details the different aspects of the most important venezuelan writer of the 60s, 70s and 80s: José Ignacio Cabrujas.

Release Date2017-01-13

Ver a Hilda Vera

A living room, two video cameras, an armchair, two televisions and a mirror: domestic daily life in which colleagues, family and friends come together to decipher the life, personality and artistic trajectory of one of the most important actresses of Venezuelan Cinema: Hilda Vera

Release Date1998-10-22

Un País Llamado El Pez que Fuma

Documentary that has unpublished testimonies from Román Chalbaud, director of El pez que fuma, an emblematic Venezuelan film from the 1970s; as well as funny conversations with the actors, 40 years after the premiere of the film. Made from a solid video-newspaper investigation, the film has unpublished stills and behind-the-scenes scenes, as well as incredible technical anecdotes, explanations about the montage and the rehearsal of scenes.

Release Date2021-01-28