Born during the first year of Argentina’s last dictatorship, Lucía Puenzo comes from a politically conscious family. Her father, Luis Puenzo, is the well-known director of The Official Story, Argentina’s first Oscar winning film from 1985. After studying literature at the University of Buenos Aires and film at the INCAA, Lucía Puenzo threw herself into the novel and cinema world.

 

Her first feature length film, XXY (2007), won this already established writer fame as a talented film director. Her first novel, The Fish Child published in 2004, would later become her second film as a director in 2009. Her novels and her films share a reoccurring theme, that is they all revolve around body-originated conflicts in her subjects’ identities. This and other themes that appear often in her works like sexual identity, immigration, abortion and/or national history (such is the case of her third film The German Doctor from 2012) tend to represent society’s often marginalized groups.

 

When asked whether her work could be considered a form of “advocacy”, Puenzo responded:

 

My way of working is to not be very conscious of the subject, the audience—or to give political voice to anyone. It would be horribly terrifying to think about things like that at the beginning—that's a paralyzing way to start a story. When I have taught screenwriting classes I tell students to be very selfish and tell the story they want to tell—to not think about the outside world until you have a second or third draft. It can actually be the worst thing if you think too much about what the message is. (Elle)

 

 

 

 

Thomas J. Shalloe

Arizona State University