Venezuelan filmmaker Jeissy Trompiz spent years unable to answer a simple question from a Brazilian friend: what is happening in Venezuela? His new documentary, «Three Houses,» is his attempt to finally respond, turning the camera on the Afro and Indigenous communities he says exist on the «periphery of the periphery» of a nation in crisis.
Trompiz left Maracaibo, the oil city where he grew up, in 2014 to study filmmaking at the International School of Film and TV in Cuba, departing just before Venezuela's economic and political collapse accelerated. That distance shaped the film, which follows his return and his reckoning with a country transformed by years of hardship.
The title refers to three distinct spaces and the communities that inhabit them, each representing a layer of Venezuelan society that Trompiz argues is rarely seen in international coverage. While global attention has focused on Caracas and the country's broader economic meltdown, the documentary centers on Afro-Venezuelan and Indigenous populations whose marginalization predates the current crisis and has deepened alongside it.
Trompiz's film arrives as Venezuelan cinema continues to find audiences abroad despite the collapse of domestic production infrastructure. Many filmmakers have left the country, and those who remain often work with limited resources, making international festival premieres a crucial outlet for their work.
The documentary also reflects a broader trend in Latin American filmmaking toward centering communities historically excluded from national narratives. By framing Afro and Indigenous Venezuelans as the subject rather than the backdrop, Trompiz joins a generation of directors using personal history as a lens for political and social commentary.
His own trajectory — from Maracaibo to Havana and then into a life of exile — mirrors the displacement experienced by millions of Venezuelans over the past decade. The film's emotional core lies in that tension between distance and return, between the filmmaker's memory of home and the reality he encounters.
«Three Houses» is not a straightforward political tract. Instead, it uses the structure of three homes to explore how identity, territory, and belonging survive in a country where institutions have eroded. For Trompiz, the question his friend once asked has no simple answer, but the film offers a portrait of the people who live that uncertainty every day.
The documentary adds to a growing body of work by Venezuelan directors examining the human cost of the country's long crisis. These films have found traction at international festivals and among diaspora audiences eager for nuanced portrayals of a nation often reduced to headlines about inflation, migration, and political conflict.
By focusing on the «periphery of the periphery,» Trompiz also challenges assumptions within Venezuela itself about whose stories matter. Afro and Indigenous communities have long faced discrimination and neglect, and the film positions their experiences as central to understanding what the country has become.
For audiences outside Venezuela, «Three Houses» offers a perspective that rarely reaches international screens: a Venezuela seen not through the lens of crisis alone, but through the resilience and complexity of communities that have endured on the margins for generations.