The Cinematheque

“A major auteur and eloquent leading light of the New Argentine Cinema.”

Nicolas Rapold, New York Times

With the seismic arrival of Zama on the festival circuit last year, Argentine auteur Lucrecia Martel (b. 1966) ended a long nine-year drought between pictures and upped her feature-film count to a lean four works over the past 16 years. (A prolific director, she is not.) In truth, had each of Martel’s too-few films not been replete with sophistication, singularity, and radical new perspectives on the seventh art, it would be hard to fathom how such an infrequent filmmaker could remain so relevant, so revered, so indispensable a figure in modern cinema, as Martel so clearly has.

Born and raised in the tropical northern province of Salta—the locale of most of her films—Martel came to international prominence in 2001 with her dazzling, dreamlike first feature La Ciénaga, winner of the prestigious Alfred Bauer Prize at the Berlin Film Festival and flashpoint for a New Argentine Cinema still gaining ground in the early aughts. (Lisandro Alonso, perhaps Martel’s closest filmic cousin, is also among its affiliates.) A deeply immersive, deeply impressionistic account of a bourgeois family in decay, Martel’s astonishing debut introduced the social themes, feminist framework, and much-lauded aesthetic sensibilities—unorthodox aural landscapes; visual tactility—that would only intensify over her next two features: the oblique coming-of-age drama The Holy Girl (2004), and the brilliantly inside-out thriller The Headless Woman (2008), considered to be one of the best films of the 21st century.

To coincide with the Vancouver premiere of Zama, Martel’s first literary adaptation, first period piece, and first long-form film in nearly a decade, The Cinematheque presents a mid-career retrospective of the director’s fiercely-original body of work. Included are her four acclaimed features—remarkable feats of sensorial cinema, all—plus Dead King, a revisionist short film from 1995.

“One of the most prodigiously talented and critically adulated filmmakers in contemporary world cinema.” Hayden Guest, BOMB Magazine

“When you discover an auteur so original, mature, and elusive as Lucrecia Martel, you feel as if you’re witnessing a miracle.” Pedro Almódovar