THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE TELEVISED [] (three stars)

Running time: 74 minutes. Not rated (violence). At Film Forum, Houston Street, west of Sixth Avenue. Through next Tuesday.

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IT was a case of being in the right place at the right time.

Kim Bartley and Donnacha O’Briain, documentarians from Ireland, had gone to Venezuela after getting permission to shoot an in-depth film about Hugo Chavez, the nation’s left-leaning president.

As fate would have it, the filmmakers were at the presidential palace in Caracas in April 2002 when Chavez was ousted in a coup backed by business interests and the CIA.

Though popular with the poor, Chavez had angered the wealthy with a plan to put his own people in charge of the nation’s oil industry, the fourth largest in the world.

The CIA, meanwhile, feared that Chavez was a Castro in the making.

Bartley and O’Briain were still on the scene and filming when, 48 hours later, the army helped a jubilant Chavez return to the presidency, where he remains until this day.

Reality TV? Forget it.

This is reality filmmaking – a fascinating front-row seat for what could be history’s shortest-lived coup, as both sides jockey for power, and state-run and private TV present vastly different takes on what’s happening.

It must be noted that Bartley and O’Briain aren’t neutral in all this. They planned to make Chavez a hero even before the coup.

But the power of what they filmed inside the presidential palace during those chaotic 48 hours makes “Revolution” most compelling.