The Cinematheque

“A small masterpiece … Every shot is dense with life.”

Meredith Brody, Chicago Reader

Few debuts this century have announced with such clarity and confidence the emergence of a truly original film artist like La Ciénaga, the exceptional first feature by Lucrecia Martel. A rumination on race, class, gender, and the spectre of Argentina’s colonial past, the film glimpses the lives of an extended bourgeois family on holiday, sojourning at their dank, decrepit rural estate in the sweltering highlands of Salta, the writer-director’s home province. The parents, in a perpetual drunken stupor, engage in petty domestic dramas while making racist accusations against the indigenous help. The constellation of kids, meanwhile, explores the nearby marshes, swimming holes, and city, the air of impending violence and promiscuity palpable. Martel evokes an experiential, almost haptic sense of place using off-screen sound and off-kilter framing to uncanny effect. Named the best Latin American film of the decade in a survey polled by Cinema Tropical.

preceded by

Dead King
(Rey muerto)
Argentina 1995
Lucrecia Martel
12 min. DCP

Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch is given a feminist retooling in Martel’s auspicious short film, one of the inaugural works of the New Argentine Cinema. Courtesy of Instituto Nacional de Cine y Artes Audiovisuales.