A founding member of the New Argentine Cinema that surged to international prominence in the mid-1990s, Lucrecia Martel (b.1966) is a dominant figure in contemporary world cinema and one of its great stylists. In her three features Martel has defined a marvelously elliptical style, a subtle narrative minimalism in which sound and gesture are often richer in meaning than the spoken word. Indeed, the complex, multi-layered sound tracks shared by La Ciénaga, La niña santa and The Headless Woman provide a nuance and tension that transforms the films into deeply immersive experiences.

One important trait uniting the group of young film school graduates who led the nuevo cine argentino, including Martel, is a fascination with “the local”— an overriding interest in those regions (often within Buenos Aires itself), vernacular languages and social classes typically overlooked by mainstream cinema. The object of Martel’s fascination has always been Salta, the tropical northern province where she was born and raised and where all of her films are set. More than just an exotic setting, the region has a rich story-telling tradition that inspires Martel’s oblique and often circular narratives and the obscure rhythms of her films. And yet, the Salta represented in Martel’s films can also be described as a psychological and emotional state—the source of the vivid, elemental texture of sounds and colors that seems to guide the acute sensory awareness shared by her heroines.

In her three films about young women, each increasingly older, each increasingly—even obsessively—in tune with their immediate environment, Martel has proposed an alternate, abstract mode of melodrama that traces the fragile and fugitive patterns of directionless love, accidents and unexplained violence. Seen together, Martel’s Salta trilogy stands as a high point of contemporary Latin American cinema.

We are pleased to announce that Lucrecia Martel will be joining us for two evenings of discussion about her work and career. - Haden Guest