Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel has been appointed president of the international jury of the 76th edition of the Venice Film Festival, the longest-running film festival in the world, to take place August 28 - September 7. Martel becomes the seventh woman and third Latin American filmmaker—after Alfonso Cuarón in 2015 and Guillermo del Toro in 2018—to hold the position.
The jury will selected the winner for the Golden Lion for Best Film, as well as other official awards. In accepting the invitation, Martel said: “It’s an honor, a responsibility, and a pleasure to be a part of this celebration of cinema, of humanity's immense desire to understand itself.”
The director the film festival Alberto Barbera commented that “four feature films and a handful of shorts, in just under two decades, have been enough to make Lucrecia Martel Latin America’s most important female director, and one of the top worldwide. In her films, the originality of her stylistic research and her meticulous mise-en-scène are at the service of a worldview free of compromises, dedicated to exploring the mysteries of female sexuality and the dynamics of groups and classes. We are grateful to her for having enthusiastically agreed to put her exacting, yet anything but uncharitable, gaze at the service of this commitment we have requested of her.”
Born in Salta, Argentina, Martel made her debut with the feature film La Ciénaga in 2001, followed by The Holy Girl / La niña santa in 2004, and The Headless Woman / La mujer sin cabeza in 2008. Her fourth feature, Zama (2017), an exploration of colonialism and racism in Latin America, had its premiere at the Venice International Film Festival.
Retrospectives of her work have screened at many art and cultural institutions, such as Harvard, MoMA, Lincoln Center, Cambridge, and London’s Tate Museum, together with a series of masterclasses about sound and narrative that the filmmaker has taught around the world. In parallel, Martel has also shown an interest in other artistic languages outside cinema. Her latest collaboration was with Björk, for whom she directed the Cornucopia concert at The Shed, acknowledged as the Icelandic artist’s most sophisticated show to date.
