Often considered one of the pioneers of New Argentine Cinema, a movement which began gaining international fame in the 1990s, Lucrecia Martel was born in Salta in the northwest of Argentina. This highland region—scarcely represented in mainstream Argentine cinema—figures prominently in Martel’s trilogy and forms the backdrop for the highly complex and fragmented stories of her female protagonists and for the exploration of social themes that resonate with national and international audiences.

Each of her three feature films boasts a considerably advanced degree of stylistic experimentation with elliptical narrative structures, nuanced soundscapes and subtle and evocative visual semiotics. Her first feature film, The Swamp (2002), about the social decay and volatile conflicts within an upper-middle class Salta family, earned awards in film festivals in France, Cuba, United States and Germany. For its part, The Holy Girl (2004) explores the confusing sexual awakening of two devoutly Catholic teenage girls living in a claustrophobic social environment.

Her latest release, The Headless Woman (2008), which was selected for competition at Cannes, expose structures of inequality and the small acts of violence that permeate postdictatorial Argentine society. Regarding the relationship between cinema and Argentine society, Martel comments:

Cinema is plagued by a malady—it remains in the hands of a single social class. Throughout the globe, it is in the hands of the upper-middle class. Even with the increasing affordability of technology, a deficiency still exist. And this comes from a fairly evident homogeneity. We have very positive sentiments and high sensitivity. This combination leads us to concern ourselves with social conflicts that we don’t really understand, as if they were objects we could easily grasp. Thus, there is a series of maladies that get repeated in scripts and films. (laFuga; my translation)

Vera R. Coleman

Arizona State University