Lucrecia Martel

The second of seven children, Martel was born and raised in Salta. Her father Ferdi owned and operated a paint shop, while her mother Bochi dedicated herself to the family. Her parents met in university (where Ferdi studied science and Bochi studied philosophy) and got married at 24 years old. Eventually they left their careers and settled in Salta. In primary school, Martel's uncle helped her develop interests in mythology, Greek, and Latin languages. In fifth grade, she set her sights on gaining admission to the elite, "ultra-Catholic" secondary school Bachillerato Humanista Moderno, because it was the only school in Salta that offered classes in ancient languages. Her parents opposed the school because of its elitist tradition which they felt reinforced class differences, but, because of the school's prominent alumni and Martel's intellectual curiosity, they did not stop her from her pursuit. Eventually, Martel passed the demanding entrance exam and enrolled in the school in the sixth grade. Since she came from a "solidly middle class" family, as she stated in a revealing 2008 interview with BOMB Magazine, Martel felt like an outsider at the school. Her peers, she said, attended the school because their families expected them to, while she only attended it so she could study Greek and Latin. In a 2018 interview with Gatopardo magazine, her mother said that at the school Martel was a "radical and challenging" honor roll student who excelled in science. In her home, Martel says "there was a very deep devotion to storytelling." Her father, mother, and maternal grandmother Nicolasa were "very good storytellers" and would tell her and her six siblings "lots of stories" to keep them quiet in bed while the adults took their afternoon siesta. She was especially fascinated by the way her grandmother used different sounds, tones, and carefully selected pauses to establish "atmosphere" in her scary, fantastical stories. "As a child," Martel says, "and even today, I have always been captivated by the form not only of stories and storytelling, but also of conversation and the way people pause and leave space for someone to intervene. All the ways that, especially when you're a child, you're charmed and steered just by words alone." She says that her fascination with this "world of conversation" in oral storytelling is what fueled her passion for cinematic storytelling and the emphasis on sound in her films. Martel first used a video camera when she was "15 or 16" years old, she says, after her father bought one to store memories of their large family. "A very big investment for us," she says of the camera, nobody in the family used it but her. "I began recording conversations and everyday things: family stuff," she says. "My family got used to it because I was always filming...There are two or three years in our family life where I don't appear at all in videos or photos, because I was always behind the camera. It was the discovery of something that fascinated me, but it didn't seem to me then that my future could be related to that." When she was 17 years old, she accompanied her father to Buenos Aires and attended a cinema projection of Camila (1984), a film written and directed by María Luisa Bemberg and produced by Lita Stantic about a real and tragic love story between a priest and a young lady of Buenos Aires high society. Impressed with the film's women creators and mainstream success, Martel says that as a result of the viewing she "thought the cinema was a woman's job", a "confusion", as she describes it, that "stayed with [her]" for years. ==Education==

Upon graduating from secondary school, Martel intended to study physics at the Balseiro Institute, but she "started to have doubts" and instead enrolled in an art history course at the National University of Salta, as well as in chemical engineering and zoology courses in Tucumán, a nearby province. "Suffer[ing] uncertainty" and trying to decide "what to study or do with [her] life", "When school was supposed to start," she says, "the economic crisis was already so severe that there weren't any professors or materials. We didn't have classes. The only real possibility was to study autodidactically, to watch films and analyze them. I watched Pink Floyd: The Wall 23 times, analyzing the montage. We would watch a film many times to learn how it was edited. I was learning in many different ways—participating in short films that friends were making, helping with production or photography, anything just to keep learning." ==Career==

Early career While attending IDAC, Martel directed the animated short films El 56 ("The 56") in 1988 and Piso 24 ("24th Floor") in 1989. As a film student at ENERC, Martel directed No te la llevarás, maldito ("You Won't Get Her, Bastard", 1989), a short film about a jealous boy who fantasizes about killing his mother's boyfriend. Film scholar Deborah Martin wrote that in the film, "there is an exploration of the subversive power of children that would become a crucial feature of [Martel's] later work, as a little boy's murderous Oedipal feelings towards his mother's lover are fully unleashed in a fantasy he lives out through his drawings." Another short film Martel directed as a student is La otra ("The Other", 1990), a documentary about a man who talks about the joys and sorrows of his life as a transvestite as he dresses up as a woman to sing tangos at a nightclub. Next, Martel directed Besos rojos ("Red Kisses", 1991), a short film based on a real-life police case between three lovers caught in a love triangle. Martel says that "just when [she] was starting to think that [a career in] film was impossible, that it was time for [her] to get a (real) job," she entered a public script competition organized by the Argentine National Film Board (INCAA), the grand prize for which was the budget to produce a short film. Martel won the contest and, as a result, was able to produce her breakout film Rey muerto ("Dead King", 1995), a violent western about a woman who escapes her abusive, alcoholic husband with her three children in a small town called Rey Muerto in provincial Salta. In a 2013 interview with ABC Color, Martel says the show "became a cult for children.... It was not commercially known, but there are a lot of young people who saw it. Many of its actors are now stars of Argentine cinema." She also made two documentaries for television: Encarnación Ezcurra (1998), about the eponymous wife of Argentine politician and army officer Juan Manuel de Rosas, and Las dependencias (The Outbuildings) (1999), a reconstruction of the life of the celebrated Argentine short fiction writer Silvina Ocampo, which draws on the testimonies of Ocampo's servants and friends. The jury recommended that she re-write the script to follow a more traditional structure around one or two protagonists, but Martel chose instead to retain the script's diffuse nature. To cast the film's child actors, Martel held 2,400 auditions, 1,600 of which she recorded on video in a garage near her home in Salta. Together with The Headless Woman, Martel's first three feature films make up what Gatopardo called "a trilogy dedicated to women and Salta," writing, "The three scripts were written by her, the three films were filmed in Salta, and, in all, always, something unexpected alters family cosmology. The characters see the life that they have armed, but, although a magma of bad omens descends on them, they do not react. In La Ciénaga, it is a domestic accident that the mother of a large family suffers. In The Holy Girl (La niña santa), it is a doctor who arrives in a town and stays in a hotel where the owner lives with her teenage daughter, a student of a religious school. In The Headless Woman (La mujer sin cabeza), it is an accident on a deserted route and a family cover-up to hide guilt and tragedy." "Martel's filmic trilogy about life in the province of Salta, Argentina," writes film scholar Paul A. Schroeder Rodríguez, "explores the country's incomplete transition to democracy from the perspective of strong, intelligent, and socially privileged female protagonists who do not conform to dominant patriarchal values: first during childhood in La Ciénaga (The Swamp, 2001), then during sexual awakening in La niña santa (The Holy Girl, 2004); and finally in adulthood, in La mujer sin cabeza (The Headless Woman, 2008)"...Martel's work is finely tuned to the particular rhythms and values of provincial middle-class Argentina, a world whose economic stagnation and moral bankruptcy she dissects through narratives that play on viewers' sympathies by constantly shifting between favorable and unfavorable perspectives on her characters." Critical reception Filmmaker magazine wrote, "[Martel's] debut feature La Ciénaga premiered at Sundance, won the Alfred Bauer Award at Berlin, and received rave reviews wherever it played. Martel's 2004 follow-up, The Holy Girl, about the sexual and religious passions of two Argentinian teenage girls, premiered at Cannes and consolidated Martel's reputation as one of the finest emerging talents in world cinema." and The Holy Girl and The Headless Woman were nominated for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festivals of 2004 and 2008, respectively. In a survey of 35 prominent film critics, scholars and industry professionals based in New York City, all three feature films figured among the top ten Latin American films of the decade, with La Ciénaga taking top place, beating the better-known (and more accessible) works of the Mexican male triad of Alejandro González Iñárritu, Alfonso Cuarón, and Guillermo del Toro. In August 2016, The Headless Woman ranked #89 on BBC's 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century, polled from 177 film critics around the world. Academic attention Martel's work has also attracted a good deal of academic attention. Many scholars have written extensively regarding the films' critiques of gender and sexuality, as well as its bold depictions of class, race, nationality, and colonialism. Film scholar Deborah Shaw argues that the trilogy "presents an anatomy of Argentine, bourgeois female identity" and "explores the micropolitics of gender, sexuality and location, rather than national narratives of oppression and collective liberation". Paul A. Schroeder Rodríguez described the films as "Oedipal with a vengeance" and argues that "each of the films is set up as a dialectic between a desiring female subject and the hegemonic patriarchal reality." In 2024 the Edinburgh University Press published ReFocus: the Films of Lucrecia Martel, a collective look at Martel’s works, including her short films and their impacts on audiences and film study. ReFocus is a series of books published by the Edinburgh University Press that expands on various directors and their works. In this collective, Martel’s four feature films are discussed alongside her films such as Muta, Pescados, and Nueva Argirópolis. In the introduction by Natalia Christofoletti Barrenha, Julia Kretje, and Paul R. Merchant, they talk about Martel and how her works impacted many, and that “In addition to such popular expressions of admiration, Martel’s films have received critical acclaim, prestigious awards and significant scholarly attention, both in her native Argentina and among scholars of global cinema. Yet to date no one volume has set out to provide a comprehensive view of Martel’s work (whether in fiction, documentary or essayistic short film) and of the range of critical responses it can generate. The chapters in this collection are authored by some of the most prominent scholars of Martel’s films and by emergent voices, and offer a fresh set of perspectives (alongside two translations of landmark essays not previously available in English) that build on existing critical trends and suggest promising new avenues for research.” Martel's 2010 short film Nueva Agirópolis ("New Argirópolis") metaphorically represents indigenous people's resistance to capture and interrogation by the Argentine state It takes its name from the 1850 book Argirópolis, written by former Argentine President and political activist Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, in which Argirópolis is the name of the capital city of a utopian democratic confederacy among Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay. The short film was commissioned by the Argentine Ministry of Culture as part of the Bicentennial celebrations and shown in theaters as part of the larger anthology film 25 miradas, 200 minutos ("25 Looks, 200 Minutes", 2010), an introspective look at the history of Argentina from the point of view of 25 film directors. In July 2011, Martel's short film Muta ("Mutate") premiered at an invitation-only event in Beverly Hills attended by stars like Emma Roberts, Hailee Steinfeld, Ashley Tisdale, Cat Deeley, Diane Kruger, Jeremy Renner, and Marilyn Manson. Commissioned by Miu Miu, the Italian high fashion company owned by Prada, the film is the second installment of the company's ''Women's Tales'' film series, which consists of short films produced in conjunction with high-profile international female directors. Directed and co-written by Martel, the film depicts a luxury modernist ghost ship haunted by faceless, insect-like female creatures attempting to rid themselves of the only man trying to get on board. In her short film Leguas ("Leagues", 2015), Martel explores the subject of academic exclusion in Argentina's indigenous communities. It was distributed as part of the anthology documentary film El aula vacía ("The Empty Classroom", 2015), in which eleven award-winning directors examine the underlying reasons why nearly one out of every two Latin American students never graduates high school. Recent career Martel's fourth feature film Zama premiered at the Venice International Film Festival in August 2017. An adaptation of Antonio di Benedetto's 1956 novel of the same name, it narrates the tragic story of Don Diego de Zama, a Spanish colonial functionary stationed in Asunción, Paraguay who waits, in vain, for his superiors to authorize his return home to his wife and family. It was an international co-production among eight countries: Argentina, Brazil, Spain, Mexico, France, the U.S., the Netherlands, and Portugal, with stars like Pedro Almodóvar, Gael García Bernal, and Danny Glover among its long list of producers. It went on to screen at the Toronto International Film Festival and New York Film Festival and received widespread acclaim from critics. For Gatopardo, Mónica Yemayel wrote "Like the other characters of Lucrecia Martel, only now in the late 18th century, Diego de Zama is unable to take charge of his own life; his fate is left in the hands of others. The identity that he has imposed on himself and that others have imposed on him is his prison." British newspaper The Guardian wrote "I hope Martel won't have to wait a further nine years before she makes her next film. She's too good a director to be sat on the sidelines for long and Zama may just be her left-field masterpiece; a picture that's antic, sensual and strange, with a top-note of menace and a malarial air." The film was chosen to represent Argentina in the Oscar and Goya Awards, the latter of which it received the nomination for Best Spanish Language Foreign Film. In May 2018, Martel was filmmaker-in-residence at the University of Cambridge, where she offered a sequence of seminars on her filmmaking practice to students, staff, and the university community. Also in 2018, Martel was approached by Marvel Studios to direct Black Widow, but declined because she wanted to be able to direct her own action scenes. In May 2019, Martel directed Icelandic singer Björk in Cornucopia, a theatrical concert production at The Shed, an arts center in Manhattan. In April 2023, Martel was celebrated as the guest of honor at Visions du Réel, an international documentary film festival in Switzerland. During the event, Martel spoke about her upcoming documentary Chocobar, which examines indigenous land rights and the legacy of colonialism in Argentina. Describing her first venture into non-fiction, Martel explained, "I am learning as I’m doing, that’s why it’s taking so long." ==Personal life==

Martel has cited María Luisa Bemberg, and Pedro Almodóvar Martel is openly lesbian. She came out to her family before the 2001 premiere of La Ciénaga because she was worried about their reaction to the implicit homosexuality depicted in the film. Her mother responded well and said she had known it since Martel was seven years old. As of June 2018, she lives in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Villa Crespo. ==Filmography==

Feature films Short films Television ==Awards and nominations==