Lucrecia Martel
It’s been nine long years since the release of The Headless Woman, the previous feature from one of the leading lights of the new wave of Argentine cinema, Lucrecia Martel. Having spent almost two years on an aborted adaptation of graphic novel, ‘El Eternauta’, she turned her attention to Antonio di Benedetto’s ‘Zama’, one of the key works of midcentury Argentine literature. Following a difficult, protracted production, the film finally premiered at the 2017 Venice Film Fesival. To say it’s been worth the wait would be underselling one of the great cinematic achievements of the decade. We sat down with the master filmmaker to talk adaptation, representation and cinema’s moral obligations.
LWLies: What can you tell us about the aborted science fiction film you were working on before Zama?
Martel: The interesting thing about that project was the way that it enabled me to think about time and how best to represent it. Because that film didn’t happen, I had all these ideas about time when I came to read . I
