& 11.7.) 16-year-old Amalia lives in an old hotel run by her divorced mother and uncle.

LA NIÑA SANTA (The Holy Girl, Argentina/Italy/Spain/The Netherlands 2004, 6. Via rhythmic images arranged in carefully restricted framings and deliberately heightened noises on the soundtrack – the clinking of ice in glasses, sun loungers being dragged along concrete – the stasis which everyone has grown to accept is translated into a corporeal experience. In fascinating, aesthetic fashion, Martel’s debut film dissects the lethargy of the white, privileged Argentinian middle class. Most of the time, they all just hang around sleepily, a torpor that carries an underlying charge of sexual desire. Mecha, the ever-inebriated matriarch, scolds her indigenous house staff, shows contempt for her husband, and watches TV reports about an apparent sighting of the Virgin Mary. The children run around with guns in their hands, the teenagers bathe in the cloudy, stagnant water of the swimming pool.

& 5.7.) A sprawling family is spending the summer in their run-down country villa. LA CIÉNAGA (The Swamp, Argentina/France/Spain/Japan 2001, 4. We are very happy that Lucrecia Martel will be our guest at Arsenal for a special preview of ZAMA and the Berlin premiere of LA MUJER SIN CABEZA (2008) as part of this retrospective of her work. Following her three first films, which revolve around girls and women in the Argentina of today and are set in Martel’s home province of Salta in the north of the country, she now enters new terrain with her long-awaited, hugely acclaimed historical epic ZAMA (2017). Lucrecia Martel’s four features from 2001–2017 all celebrated their world premieres at the major international film festivals in Berlin, Cannes, and Venice. Her plots are minimal and her narratives dispense with exposition – which makes her films’ characteristic aesthetic all the more complex: different elements of sound are layered on top of one another in intricate fashion to emphasize the sensorial and the experiential her unusual framings produce deliberately restricted images which never show the whole of things she works with off-screen space and plays with focus, forging images where it’s impossible to say what is central and what is marginal. She draws on truly cinematic devices to narrate complex sets of relationships, whether those within families or otherwise, and keeps a careful eye on symptoms of individual and social disintegration and decay in so doing, making sure to always address the asymmetrical relationship between Argentina’s privileged and those of indigenous origin. Argentinian filmmaker Lucrecia Martel (*1966) is seen as one of contemporary world cinema’s most extraordinary exponents of style.

Federico fellini films