Argentina has announced this morning that Lucrecia Martel's latest film Zama has been selected to represent the South American country in the foreign language film category at the 90th edition of the Academy Awards. The film, which is having it's U.S. premiere this weekend as part of the main slate of the 55th edition of the New York Film Festival, will be distributed in the United States by Strand Releasing.
Based on the 1956 novel Zama by Antonio di Benedetto, Martel's fourth film co-produced by Pedro Almodóvar's El Deseo Cine and Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna's Canana. The film stars Mexican actor Daniel Giménez Cacho as Don Diego de Zama, a Spanish officer of the seventeenth century settled in Asunción, who awaits his transfer to Buenos Aires.
Argentina is the only Latin American country to have ever won an Oscar in the foreign language category, and has earned it twice, in 1985 for Luis Puenzo's The Official Story and in 2009 for Juan José Campanella's The Secret in Their Eyes. Argentina has earned a total of seven nominations, more recently in 2014 for Damián Szifron's Wild Tales.
