Lucrecia Martel Director
Filmography Selected
Born in 1966, Martel studied animation at Avellaneda Experimental (AVEX), attended the National Experimentation Filmmaking School (ENERC) for several years, and studied Communication Science. She directed a number of short films between 1988 and 1994, including Rey Muerto (Dead King), when was part of Historías Breves I (Brief Tales I). In 2001, Martel directed the film La Ciénaga (The Swamp), which won awards in Berlin, Havana, Toulouse, and Sundance, among other festivals. In 2004, Martel wrote and directed La Niña Santa (The Holy Girl), which premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival that year. In 2008 came The Headless Woman (La Mujer sin Cabazo), and now after a long interval, Zama, which premiered in the 2017 Venice Film Festival.
2025: Nuestra Tierra (Landmarks)
2018: Zama
2007: The Headless Woman (La Mujer sin Cabeza)
2004: The Holy Girl (La Niña Santa)
2001: The Swamp (La Ciénaga)
1995: Rey Muerto, short
“The Furious Moral Clarity of Lucrecia Martel...
In the Argentine filmmaker’s new documentary...and a recently restored masterpiece, “The Headless Woman,” an elusiveness of form becomes the most direct way to the truth.
Martel began planning the film while working on “Zama”. Both films, though entirely different in form and focus, share a blistering denunciation of colonialist oppression and a commitment to ushering indigenous lives out of the shadows of Argentinian history.”
Justin Chang, The New Yorker
"The intersection of recording technology, history and human lives is the crux of “Our Land,” which was many years in the making. It tells a harrowing story of crime and a hunt for justice…the stories that Chuschagasta men and women tell Martel in “Our Land” bear witness to other Indigenous people who, like Chocobar, suffered or died defending their ancestral land, but without cameras there to watch, and only the community left to tell their stories."
Alissa Wilkinson, The New York Times
"Landmarks is a landmark in and of itself, in the career of celebrated Argentinian auteur Lucrecia Martel, as her first foray into documentary, after a career making classics including The Holy Girl, The Headless Woman, and Zama. Playing at times like a restrained fictional courtroom drama, this documentary explores the 2018 trial of a group of men for the murder of indigenous community leader Javier Chocobar in 2009. That long gap between Chocobar’s death and his murderers facing justice provides the first clue that this is a trial taking place in a particular context, one which Martel unfolds gradually, with surgical precision, in a documentary defined by robust and muscular filmmaking technique allied to a clear-eyed, slow-burning anger."
Catherine Bray, Little White Lies
"As Landmarks goes on, it becomes much clearer in its depiction of the issues at hand, and indeed explicitly polemical – not least in a voice-over by singer Mariana Carrizo, protesting against the disempowering of Argentina’s indigenous peoples. While various experts also state the case for the Chuscagasta, what is essential about Landmarks is that, above all, it lets the people tell their own story. As the end titles suggest, though, theirs continues to be a hard-fought struggle, even if justice appears at times to briefly – all too briefly – prevail."
Jonathan Romney, Screen International
“Lucrecia Martel’s beautiful account of an indigenous murder case...about the shooting of Javier Chocobar (it) is a mannered and dignified work, laden with post-colonial tension and the weight of institutions.”
Leslie Felperin, The Guardian
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THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
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SLANT magazine
THE FILM STAGE
"It’s hard to stop thinking about Lucrecia Martel‘s gutting true-crime documentary “Nuestra Tierra (Landmarks),” long in the works and about the 2009 murder of an Argentine Indigenous leader, after you’ve seen it."
Ryan Lattanzio, IndieWire
"An urgent film with a bleeding heart that deserves to be seen by everyone around the world. Martel has made an essential work."
Jourdain Searles, The Film Stage
"Lucrecia Martel's beguilingly sensuous dramas have depicted her country's class and racial fissures in numerous ways...But the gifted Argentinia auteur has never tackled the issue as directly as in Landmarks/Nuestra Tierra."
Jordan Mintzer, The Hollywood Reporter
"A sobering investigation of an indigenous leader's murder. The film is less a portrait of one martyred man than a mosaic of a resistant community."
Marshall Shaffer, The Slant Magazine
"A powerful work of reeclamation and advocacy for native peoples who have long been disenfranchised and dehumanized by systemic forces in colonial Argentina."As Martel shows us, this isn’t just about who killed Chocobar and why. It’s about the bullet being one of many wounds inflicted upon indigenous peoples over 500 years of Argentinian history."
Clint Worthington, Rogerebert.com
