On the heels of Marco Bellocchio, the guest of honour at the 2022 edition, for this year’s iteration (21-30 April), Visions du Réel has decided to hand its Honorary Award to Lucrecia Martel, one of the leading figures of contemporary film who has contributed to the rise of the so-called New Argentine Cinema. Visions du Réel will also dedicate a retrospective to her, which will train the spotlight on her close and ever-shifting relationship with reality.

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Martel was born and raised in Salta, in north-western Argentina. She studied at the Avellaneda Experimental and at the National Experimentation and Film Direction School in Buenos Aires, even though she has described herself as self-taught on several occasions. The challenging political and economic situation in which Martel trained and helmed her first few short films is the same as that encountered by many key directors of the New Argentine Cinema that she is part of.

Her filmography, which began with a string of short documentaries directed between 1988 and 1994, comprises four features and 25 titles in total, which stretch beyond cinematic boundaries, strictly speaking. Always open to different genres but also to other disciplines, in 2019, she teamed up with singer Björk, for whom she directed the concert Cornucopia. Ever on the lookout for new languages of expression, during the lockdown, she made an immersive work called The Passage, which was presented at the EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam.

Ever since her debut feature, 2001’s The Swamp, which scooped the Silver Bear – Alfred Bauer Prize at the Berlinale, among other awards, she has established herself as a fundamental voice in today’s film landscape. Her popularity with the critics was confirmed by her second film, 2004’s The Holy Child, a tale of religious and sexual passion involving two Argentinian teenage girls, which was selected for the Cannes competition. Four years later, she presented another movie at Cannes – the intriguing The Headless Woman [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Lucrecia Martel
scheda film] in 2017, which broached delicate subjects, such as colonialism and racism in Latin America. The film world-premiered at the Venice Film Festival, a gathering that welcomed her back in 2019 to chair its jury. Her next documentary feature, Chocobar, is slated to come out some time this year.

Martel’s works are characterised by a critical outlook on normality, whether this is in relation to gender or sexuality, as well as by a bold reflection on matters of class, race and nationality, closely tied to the subject of colonialism. Desire and its revolutionary power are also at the heart of her narratives, which present themselves as alternatives to the patriarchal society surrounding her. The medium of film thus becomes an antidote to genuine and ever-present social and political oppression.