Lights! Camera! Revolución!

In the balding foothills just east of Caracas, a sprawling glass-and-concrete structure bakes in the equatorial sun. The bleached façade and tinted windows have the look of a strip mall or generic suburban office block. But La Villa del Cine—"Cinemaville"—is the headquarters for Hugo Chávez's latest campaign in the struggle for Latin America's hearts and minds: a state-owned film studio that's the Venezuelan strongman's answer to what he denounces as the "tyranny" of Hollywood. His loyalists hail it as a "platform" to "revolutionize consciousness." Many Venezuelans just call it Hugowood.

It's only 18 miles from downtown, but the drive there turns out to be a two-and-a-half-hour ordeal. With state-subsidized gasoline at a petropopulist 17 cents a gallon, the entire nation of 27 million seems to be on the road this morning. President Chávez, known to his devotees as Comandante Hugo, has called upon people across Latin America to rise up in the name of the 19th-century independence hero Simón Bolivar, break the shackles of neoliberalism, and join the fight for "21st-century socialism." To that end he courts Hizbullah and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is stockpiling Russian-made fighter jets and tanks, and has given aid and comfort to Colombian narcoguerrillas. But stuck in traffic outside the capital, you have to wonder why anyone believes his rhetoric. No one in Venezuela will ever make it to the Bolivarian revolution on time.

Cinemaville is a similarly hollow threat. Just inside the studio gates, a man-made canal leads to an artificial stream and lakebed—but there was no water in them when I visited recently. Indoors, the corridors and edit bays are vacant except for one or two stray techies in jeans and tennis shoes. Rows of sewing machines lie idle under dust covers in the costume atelier. An electrical fire earlier this year knocked out most of the studio's work-stations, forcing producers, editors, seamstresses, carpenters, and engineers to relocate. "Here is Studio 1. Six to eight different film sets can fit in here," a perky Cinemaville PR aide chirps, opening the door to an empty warehouse.

Like most everything else in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Cinemaville was built to be noticed but not scrutinized. Chávez has a habit of inaugurating partly completed projects for the cameras and then losing interest in them. His leadership style is the stuff of cinema, replete with red berets, -camouflage-clad citizen militias, and gale-force stump speeches. But few Venezuelans would be surprised if this project turns out like so many others—impulsive, exorbitant, overstated, and ultimately cast aside. Reputable filmmakers keep their distance if they can afford to. Others grit their teeth. "Because they need the money, and because Chávez has plenty of it, filmmakers are a highly blackmailable class," says Fernando Rodríguez, an art critic for the Caracas paper Tal Cual. "I wouldn't have anything to do with the Villa if I could," a noted Venezuelan director told me, and then asked not to be named.

Like the 20th-century autocrats he emulates, Chávez is fascinated by the power of cinema. Ever since Hitler turned to Leni Riefenstahl, dictators have dreamed of harnessing the epic force of the big screen for their political script. With Cinemaville, Chávez has positioned himself, consciously or not, as heir to the leading men of 20th-century totalitarianism. (Even the studio name, La Villa del Cine, is a steal from Mussolini's Cinecittà film studio.) Having intimidated or shut down most of the independent press, rewritten the Constitution, and nationalized hundreds of companies, Chávez has come to dominate millions of Venezuelans' daily lives. Hugowood is his bid to control their imaginations as well. Its official slogan is "Lights, camera, revolution!"

Oil money has kept the cameras rolling since Hugowood first opened in 2006. At present the studio complex has 13 original feature films in the can, with 12 more in the works and a reported budget of $16 million for 2009 alone (though only two features have been released so far this year). The output includes everything from historical epics to romantic comedies to documentaries. Narratives vary, but the one hard rule is to divide the world into two categories: those who are for Chávez and those who are against him. And since a revolution's work is never done, every Monday a committee of state-appointed experts examines a fresh batch of screenplays, weighing them for appropriately Bolivarian content. Thought control? "This is about defending Venezuela," says Hector Sóto, Venezuela's culture minister. "I worry about our kids spending their weekends watching Mel Gibson killing people for an hour and a half."

The studio's producers, directors, and actors cut their teeth in telenovelas, a genre in which Venezuela excels. But at run times of two hours or more and freighted with revolutionary gravitas, Cinemaville's features sometimes feel like soaps on steroids. "Our job here is not about politics but to seduce the viewer by making the best picture we can," says Armando Silva, the studio postproduction manager. But the not-so-hidden messages are hard to miss in romantic comedies like the newly released Libertador Morales, the Justice Maker, about a motorcycle-taxi driver, a Robin Hood on two wheels who battles Caracas traffic by day and crime by night. (Cinemaville's top draw this year, it has grossed roughly $200,000, against Venezuelan box-office receipts of more than $11 million for Ice Age 3.) For those who prefer documentaries, The Venezuela Petroleum Company draws on newsreels, eyewitness interviews, and even cartoons to tell how Venezuelans rescued their fabulous oil wealth from rapacious Texans.