Cinema Releases - Zama

Lucrecia Martel's first film in 10 years premiered in Venice 2017 to huge acclaim.

Zama, an officer of the Spanish Crown born in South America, waits for a letter from the King granting him a transfer from the town in which he is, to a better place. His situation is delicate. He must ensure that nothing overshadows his transfer. He is forced to accept submissively every task entrusted to him by successive Governors who come and go as he stays behind.

The years go by and the letter from the King never arrives. When Zama notices everything is lost, he joins a party of soldiers that go after a dangerous bandit.

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.

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

'In Lucrecia Martel’s magnificent drama, a Spanish officer stuck at a remote South American outpost numbs his burgeoning panic with erotic reveries…It’s a film that returns Martel to her themes of guilt, sex and shame – her first picture, in fact, since the enigmatic The Headless Woman 10 years ago. But Zama, with its eerie andante tempo and period setting, gives her ideas a new exalted platform, a new theatrical and formal grandeur.'

Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

Hard to suppress the hyperbole with this one. Truly an awesome achievement...Lucrecia Martel’s tale of colonial misadventure in South America is one of the great cinematic achievements of the decade.

David Jenkins, Little White Lies

"A beguiling, haunting, comic indictment of the ills of colonialism."

Matthew Anderson, CineVue

'Lucrecia Martel, the single most acclaimed filmmaker of Argentina’s New Wave, and a maker of taxing, sly, formally adventurous cinema not quite like anyone else’s… an absurd, ruthlessly funny take on empire.'

Tim Robey, The Daily Telegraph

'Zama confounds easy interpretation and on my second viewing I feel there’s still much to discover about this sumptuous, emotionally reverberant drama. It’s a thrillingly layered film, and is perhaps best experienced by surrendering to its intoxicating strangeness.'

Ed Lawrenson, The Big Issue

Ten years ago Martel made a dreamy thriller called The Headless Woman that made delicate sense of Argentina’s brutal pecking order. She shows the same finesse here. She disorientates us with her sound design, she beguiles us with one of the most evocative soundtracks of the year. Music from Brazilian duo Los Indios Tabajaras playfully reminds us that a tropical paradise is never what it seems…where the film is intentionally vague, the music is precise. Civilisation is corrupt to its core.

Lucrecia Martel’s masterly adaptation of Antonio di Benedetto’s 1956 novel maroons Daniel Giménez Cacho’s preening officer of the Spanish empire in an Argentine backwater, then turns the screw.

Maria Delgado, Sight & Sound